Griddlers make great “paint by number” puzzles for kids of all ages

February 17th, 2008 | by Sol |

I recently discovered a great web-site, Griddlers.net. Griddler The site has lots of puzzles called Griddlers, which I had never before heard of. Griddlers remind me of Sudoku; they’re logic puzzles like Sudoku, but with an interesting twist. Once you’ve solved the puzzle you end up with a nice picture in a grid, like the one shown here. Griddlers have number clues around an image. You use the clues to determine which squares in the grid to fill in. Some Griddlers are even multi-colored. If you get all of the clues right then you get a pretty picture. What I like so much about Griddlers is the positive and very visual reinforcement that comes from solving a puzzle. With Sudoku, which is a great kind of puzzle, you do get the satisfaction of completing the puzzle but there’s something neat about seeing a picture appear before your eyes. Griddlers come in all levels of difficulty so even the younger ones can enjoy it.

Griddlers.net has instructions for solving Griddlers, a helpful tutorial, user accounts that let you track which Griddlers you’ve solved, and a community forum. There are even Griddlers for the little ones, called Kiddlers. And, you can create your own Griddlers to share with the community and even upload image files and have their software convert them to Griddler puzzles. Wow! As of this writing there are 53,867 Griddlers. Most everything on the site is free. What Griddlers.net sells is downloadable books of Griddler puzzles at pretty reasonable prices.

There are a bunch of Griddler sites. The easiest way to find some to check out is to do a google search for the two words “griddler puzzle”, without the quotes. Wikipedia has a nice article about Griddlers. The article tells of the many names that used to refer to these puzzles, including Nonograms, Paint By Numbers, Pic-a-Pix, Picross, Pixel Puzzles, and many others. The article also tells of how Griddlers were invented in Japan in 1987 by two people independent of one another.

I’m delighted to discover Griddlers and I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of them up to now given that they’ve been around for years.

Enjoy!

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  1. 12 Responses to “Griddlers make great “paint by number” puzzles for kids of all ages”

  2. By --Deb on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply

    Huh. Never even heard of them, but they look like fun. I’ll have to check them out.

  3. By PreSchool Mama on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply

    I just checked it out, and it looks cool. I think I need additional Fireflox plugins to access all parts of it, though. The Kiddlers section should be interesting.

    Thanks for the find, Sol!

  4. By Karen (Karooch from Scraps of Mind) on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply

    This looks really cool Sol. Thanks for the link.

  5. By JoLynn Braley on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply

    These look like fun, thanks Sol!

  6. By mrburkemath on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply

    Games magazine regularly publishes puzzles like these. I beleive that they call them “Paint-by-Numbers”, or something like that. My wife loves these. It’s the only puzzle other than crosswords that I regularly see her solve.

  7. By HowToMe on Feb 19, 2008 | Reply

    Great site! Thank you for your nice post.

  8. By Leena on Feb 23, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Sol,
    I know I promised you to write about Japanese puzzles, but unfortunately I have had not time yet.
    The best site in my opinion for picture logic puzzles is www.conceptispuzzles.com
    In addition to Pic-A-Pix puzzles they have 4 more types of picture puzzles (and 6 types of number logic). I am familiar with Griddlers.net but they unfortunately have some very unsatisfactory pictures and you never know what you get when you start a puzzle. The puzzles are mainly created by the users.
    Conceptis uses artists to create the pictures and even though I have solved their puzzles for 3 years, I never have been disappointed with the quality. Most of those Griddlers I have started I have discarded in the middle of solving.
    The puzzles mrburkemath mentions are from Conceptis.
    They have also great Flash tutorials.
    Check the site and enjoy!

  9. By Sol on Feb 25, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Leena,

    That’s right. You’re the resident expert on Japanese puzzles in this community. Thanks for piping in. I will check them out!

  10. By Sol on Feb 25, 2008 | Reply

    @Deb, Preschool Mama, Karen, JoLynn, HowToMe: Thanks for the kinds comments.

    @MrBurkeMath: Games magazine isn’t one I frequent but it’s nice to know they have some of these puzzles.

  11. By Lisa on Mar 6, 2008 | Reply

    www.webpbn.com is by far THE best paint-by-numbers site! You can create your own puzzles there; solve other people’s puzzles; rate the puzzles by difficulty and quality; post comments about puzzles; participate in the forum; take part in the chat; search for puzzles by author/difficulty/quality/size/number of colors used; save your puzzle and get back to it later… Can you tell I’m addicted to these puzzles?

  12. By Sol on Mar 15, 2008 | Reply

    @Lisa: On behalf of the readers here, thanks for the mini review of the webphn site.

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