nonogame is the nonogram app I never expected to make

TLDR: You can play three daily puzzles at nonogame.app right now!

Here is one I didn't see coming…

In the mid-2000s, around the time Sudoku was getting popular here in the US, another game came on my radar around the same time, nonograms. Nonograms were similar to Sudoku in that they gave you a grid and asked you to use process of elimination logic to fill it out in a very particular way, and it scratched the same itch as Sudoku for me.

I got back into playing this game in the past month, and while I found a really good app on the iPhone, I hadn't found a web interface that I actually enjoy using. And well, that sounded like a fun weekend project, so I took some time this weekend and put together nonogame.

I won't get into all the details here. You should just go play it if you want to get an idea for how it works, but it is a desktop optimized way to play nonograms, and for my money, it is the best UI for doing this on the web.

Anyway, the concept here is that you can come to the site every day and there are three puzzles for you to solve: a small, a medium, and a large. They follow the newspaper puzzle format of being easiest on Monday and getting harder through the week until you get the most difficult ones on Sunday.

I also wanted to explore having a really nice flow from anonymous to logged in to paid users. Anyone can go to the site and play today's daily games. Nothing carries over till tomorrow or anything, but you can play them and enjoy them for 5 to 30 minutes, depending on how difficult they are. If you create a free account, which is of course password free and relies on welcome emails and passkeys, you can still play those daily games, but you can also save your progress and build up streaks and play across different devices. Finally, if you pay for the service, you'll get to go back in time and play previous days puzzles. And there are dozens of collections and over a thousand other puzzles you can play on demand.

Last but not least, I'm pleased with the favicon I made for this, which evokes the Quick Reviews heart. ❤️