Whether you know them as “nonograms” or “picross,” Japanese visual logic puzzles first received broad international exposure in the 1995 Nintendo Game Boy game Mario’s Picross, a cartridge with 256 different black-and-white puzzles inside. Picross games start with an empty grid that has numbers on each of its sides, telling you how many squares should be filled in, only implicitly suggesting how many need to be left empty.…
