Nonograms: The Glasswright

Nonograms you can finish by thinking.

A nonogram is a grid with numbers beside every row and column, saying how many squares in that line are filled and in what order. Work the rows against the columns and only one picture fits.

Every puzzle here is solved by a solver first, one line at a time, and thrown out if it cannot be finished that way. So there is never a point where the only move left is a guess — not in the campaign, not at the bench, not in the daily.

A fire has taken every window in the church at Saint-Aubin. The drawings survived, and you are the new apprentice. Twelve panels to cut, in order: the lantern from over the door, Saint Peter's key, the wolf from the parish badge, the ashfall somebody drew the week after the fire, and the west rose at twenty-five squares across.

Maren Vosse runs the workshop and Wren is a year ahead of you. Between them they teach the whole puzzle in plain English — where to start on a nearly-full row, what to do when a row runs out of things to tell you, and why you never have to guess.

Every line in the game is voiced. Maren is dry, Yorkshire and sixty; Wren is Irish, twenty-five and on your side. They talk to you across the opening, before and after every panel, and while you are stuck — the hints are voiced too, so the help arrives as somebody in the room rather than a box of text.

It is not a thing nonograms usually come with. Turn it off and they still say everything on screen.

Most hints hand you a square. This one names the line: row fourteen can be taken further with what is already down. That is the part worth learning, and you can press again if you would rather just see it.

It also checks. If something you have marked cannot be right, it says so and says which row — because the worst hour in this kind of puzzle is the one spent stuck on a mistake you made forty minutes ago.

Four sizes, from 10x10 to 25x25, with a new picture drawn and proved every time you sit down. Best times kept for each.

The daily puzzle is built from the date, so the puzzle you get is the puzzle everybody gets — small on a Monday, the full 25x25 on a Sunday. No server, no sign-in, no leaderboard to farm. Just today's sheet, your time, and a streak the game keeps for you.

Drag to lay glass, right-drag to cross a square off, and a finished line crosses itself off for you. Undo takes back a whole stroke. Play it on the keyboard if you prefer. Zoom in on the big grids. Quit in the middle of anything and your place is kept.

The glass, the pencil and the window lighting at the end are all made as the game runs. A quiet piece for the workbench plays on the menu and stops when you sit down to a puzzle. Sound, music and voices each have a switch of their own, so you can keep the ones you want.

It keeps everything on your own machine, plays entirely offline, and has no ads, no account and nothing to buy.

Built for Windows 11, and at home on Windows 10.