How to Play Bytegrid
Bytegrid is a nonogram — a picture logic puzzle, also known as a picross, griddler or Japanese crossword. You are given a blank grid with numbers along the top and down the left side. Those numbers are the only information you get, and they are enough to work out exactly which squares are filled and which are empty. Solve the grid and a small picture appears.
There is a new puzzle every day, the same one for everybody, and a streak that grows as long as you keep solving.
Reading the clues
The numbers beside a row tell you the lengths of the filled blocks in that row, in order, with at least one empty square between blocks.
So a row clue of 3 1 in a 10-wide grid means: a block of exactly three filled squares, then at least one empty square, then exactly one filled square. Everything else in that row is empty. It does not tell you where they sit — that is what you have to deduce, usually by combining it with what the column clues tell you.
A clue of 0 means the entire line is empty, which is more useful than it sounds.
The overlap rule
This is the single most important technique in nonograms, and it is what gets almost every puzzle started.
Take a row of 10 squares with a clue of 8. The block of eight can start at square 1, 2 or 3 — three possible positions. But look at what those three positions have in common: squares 3 through 8 are filled in every single one of them. So those six squares can be filled immediately, with certainty, before you know anything else.
The general rule: any clue larger than half the line length forces some squares no matter where its block ends up. Slide the block to the far left, slide it to the far right, and whatever overlaps is guaranteed.
Scan for the biggest numbers first and apply this everywhere it works. It will usually give you enough of a foothold to start the real deduction.
Marking is not optional
New players fill squares and ignore the Mark tool. This is the main reason people get stuck.
Crossing out a square you have proved is empty costs you nothing — marks never lose a heart — and it dramatically changes what you can see. A row with three squares crossed out at one end is a much more constrained row than the same one left blank, and constraints are what the next deduction is built from.
The habit to build: every time you complete a clue, immediately cross out the rest of that line. If a row's clue is 4 and you have placed all four, the other six squares are empty and you should say so on the board.
Alternate rows and columns
Nonograms are solved by bouncing between the two directions. You resolve something in a row, which fixes a square in a column, which lets you resolve that column, which fixes more squares in other rows.
When you are stuck, the answer is almost never "stare harder at this row". It is "look at the columns that pass through the squares you just resolved". Players who work one direction exhaustively before switching find the puzzle far harder than it actually is.
Hearts and why guessing does not pay
You have three hearts. Filling a square that should be empty costs one. Marking is always free.
This matters because it removes the strategy of guessing and backing out. In a nonogram that is guaranteed logically solvable, a guess is never necessary — and here it is actively expensive. If you find yourself about to fill a square because it "looks right", stop and find the deduction instead. There always is one.
That guarantee is not a claim we are making loosely. Every design in Bytegrid was run through a solver that only uses line-by-line logic, and any puzzle that could not be finished that way was thrown out.
Why a daily puzzle
Nonograms are the kind of puzzle that rewards returning. The techniques — overlap, completing lines, cross-referencing directions — become automatic over a couple of weeks, and a grid that took eight minutes on day one takes three by day fifteen.
The daily format gives that progress something to sit against. Everyone plays the same grid, your streak measures consistency rather than raw speed, and the share text carries your hearts and time without spoiling the picture for anyone who has not played yet.
Where nonograms came from
The puzzle type was invented independently in 1987 by two people: Non Ishida, a Japanese graphics editor, and James Dalgety in the UK. Ishida's version won a window-art competition in Tokyo; the puzzles were published in Japan shortly after and reached British newspapers in 1990, where Dalgety coined the name "nonogram" after her.
They have been a fixture of puzzle magazines and handheld games ever since, most famously as Nintendo's Picross series. The appeal has not changed: the rules take a minute to learn, the deductions take months to master, and there is a small satisfying reveal at the end of every one.
Plays on any device
Bytegrid runs entirely in your browser using HTML5 — no downloads, no plugins and no account. It works on Android phones, iPhones, tablets, laptops and desktops, with drag-to-fill support on touchscreens. Your streak and best times are stored locally in your browser.
