Play Griddlers Online, Free
A new griddler every day — no download, no login, solvable by pure logic.
Griddlers and nonograms are the same puzzle
If “griddlers” is the name you grew up with, you are almost certainly a British solver — or you learned the puzzle from one. The grid, the number clues along the top and side, the hidden picture that emerges as you fill the right cells: it is all identical to what this site calls a nonogram. Only the label differs, and the label has a very specific, very British history.
A name chosen by newspaper readers
The puzzle arrived in the UK when its Japanese creator, Non Ishida, showed her “Window Art Puzzles” to the English puzzle collector James Dalgety in 1989. Dalgety coined the word nonogram in her honour and persuaded The Sunday Telegraph to run the puzzles weekly from 1990 — the first regular newspaper home the puzzle ever had outside Japan, spawning a popular series of puzzle books along the way.
Then came a very newspaper-flavoured twist. After Ishida and Dalgety parted ways in the mid-1990s, the Telegraph needed a fresh name — so in 1998 it asked its readers to invent one. The winning entry was “Griddler”, and the paper's puzzles, and the long-running book series that followed from 1999, have carried the name ever since. Few puzzles can claim their name was chosen by a public competition; griddlers can.
The community that kept the name alive
The word outgrew the newspaper. Griddlers.net, one of the oldest and largest puzzle communities on the web, adopted it and built a catalogue of member-made puzzles solved by enthusiasts from more than a hundred countries, including huge multi-grid designs and triangular “triddlers.” Between the books and the community, an entire generation of solvers — especially in the UK and Europe — knows the puzzle primarily as griddlers, while gamers say picross and magazine readers say hanjie. The full story is in our history of the puzzle.
Griddlers on this site
- A fresh daily griddler — the same board for everyone, with streaks and a leaderboard.
- Unlimited free play from quick 5x5 warm-ups to demanding 25x25 grids.
- Every puzzle has exactly one solution reachable by logic — the same standard the newspaper puzzles held.
- No account, no download, no paywall. Works in any browser, phone or desktop.
Sharpen your solving
If you can already finish the small grids, the solving techniques guides cover the deductions that crack the big ones — overlaps, edge logic, splitting, and the contradiction test — and the library holds every past daily to practice on.