Paint by numbers, also known as Japanese puzzles, nonograms, picross puzzles, or pikurosu, are logic puzzles in which cells in a grid have to be coloured (or left blank) according to numbers given at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. The numbers measure how many unbroken lines of filled-in squares there are in any given row or column. For example, a clue of "4 8 3" would mean there are sets of four, eight, and three filled squares, in that order, with at least one space in between each group.
These puzzles are often black and white but can also have some colors. If they are colored, the number clues will also be colored in order to indicate the color of the squares. Two differently-colored numbers may or may not have a space in between them. For example, a black four followed by a red two could mean four black spaces, some empty spaces, and two red spaces, or it could simply mean four black spaces followed immediately by wto red ones.
Nintendo picked up on this puzzle fad awhile back and released two Picross titles for the Game Boy and nine for the Super Famicom (eight of which were released in two-month intervals for the Nintendo Power Super Famicom Cartridge Writer as the "NP Pikurosu" series) in Japan. Only one of these, Mario's Picross for the GameBoy, was ever released in the United States.
Paint by numbers is also a children's activity, similar in concept to the more complex logic puzzle. A black on white line drawing contains several fully enclosed areas, each marked with a number. Each number corresponds to a certain color of paint, often provided in a set along with multiple drawings. By following the number schema, the drawing is appropriately colored.
