Boxes Boxes Everywhere

[trickykitty]

Today's Game Giveaway of the Day is a logic puzzle game that I'm particularly fond of. It's just like my Paint-Doku I picked up a few years back and still bring out every so often to play. In Paint-Doku, the ON boxes create a picture. I use two map pencils to denote ON and OFF boxes, which means I'm essentially coloring in the picture one box at a time. Today's game makes patterns rather than images, but as far as logic puzzles go, that's not a game killer.

EDIT: They start making images in the higher levels, but they go so quickly after finishing the puzzles it's difficult to see what they are.

It's a purely logical If-Then grid game similar to, but much more complex than, Mine Sweeper. The numbers across the side and top of the grid tell you how many congruent sets of boxes there are in each row and column, how many boxes are in each set, and the order (either from left to right or from top to bottom) of those sets. There's only a couple of If-Then rules to follow in order to implement the solving algorithm, but just like with the more difficult Sudoku puzzles, these can get pretty damned tedious.

Here's a simple example from the game link above. You can see that the bottom row has 0 sets, meaning that all of those boxes are going to be OFF, and the second column has one set of 4 congruent boxes. Since the bottom box in the second column can't be ON, then that means the top 4 boxes make up that set, and therefore can be turned ON. If the grid had started off completely blank, that top row would have said 5, and I would have filled in that row as my very first action. (Since this is only a 5x5 grid, I would have known that the entire top row should be ON.)

EDIT: They are apparently called Nonograms, Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, or Griddlers. Interesting names.