yayagram - Play nonograms/picross in your terminal

yayagram is a puzzle game in which you fill out a grid with cells based on logic and number clues.

White signifies a filled cell, red signifies a crossed out cell.

Playing it is as easy as:

cargo install yayagram
yayagram

Binaries are also provided in the Releases.

Features

• Runs in the terminal!
• Cross-platform: runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.
• Helpful features like undo, redo and reset that are just a button press away.
• Create your own grids for others to play.
• A new kind of cell: maybed.
• A measurement tool to let you enjoy even the biggest of grids.
• Intuitive to play.

Controls

• Mouse movement: select a cell.
• Left-click: fill a cell.
• Middle-click: maybe a cell.
• Right-click: cross out a cell.
• R: reset the grid.
• Q: undo cell placements or a grid reset.
• E: redo cell placements or a grid reset.
• X: set measurement point.
• W, A, S, D and arrow keys: darken the cells in that direction.
• Tab: toggle the editor.
• Enter: save the edited grid as a file locally.
• Esc: exit.

Editor

Press Tab to toggle the editor and start placing the cells for your grid. You can make use of all cell kinds. To export your grid, press Enter to save while in editor mode. This will create a new .yaya grid file. Note that in the same session it will always write the grid to the same file again unless renamed.

On Windows you can drag .yaya grid files onto the .exe to play the grid. On Linux and macOS the .yaya file is passed via the command line.

img2yaya

As an alternative to the editor you can generate .yaya grids using @AaronErhardt's amazing img2yaya to convert images to playable .yaya files!

Command line arguments

The program takes a single number for a squared grid size, two numbers for a width and height or the filename of a .yaya grid file.

yayagram # a random 5x5 grid
yayagram 10 # a random 10x10 grid
yayagram 5 15 # a random 5x15 grid
yayagram example.yaya # a custom grid

--help, -h and --version, -V are also supported.

Measurement tool

Particularly on bigger grids it can sometimes become hard to count all the cells. For this you can use the measurement tool. Simply press X to set your first point and then X again to set your second point. You will then be able to see the distance between those two points with the measured cells that appear. Measured cells never overwrite cell kinds other than empty cells and its own.

If you save a grid that contains measured cells, their distance indices won't be saved and the measured cells will only appear as green when that grid is loaded.

Maybed

The blue "maybed" cell kind can be placed on the grid with middle-click and is supposed to make "what if?" reasoning and trying out things easier, as an alternative to using crossed out or filled cells which might be confusing. It can help you imagine theoretical situations better.

Other Tips

• Try to avoid guesssing and play it safe! Guessing can come back later to bite you. Guessing is unsafe.
• Don't forget to cross out cells that you are sure won't be filled. This helps immensely at ruling out possibilities.

Example

Here's a simple example to help you grasp the game.

First, let's look at the clues on the very top: the first one is 2. It tells us that exactly 2 (2 cells in a row) of the 3 cells below it are filled. Through logic we can determine that this means that at least the middle cell is definitely filled:

Let's look at what the clue next to it to the right tells us (3). This clue means that there is exactly 3 cells in a row filled below. Because we only have 3 cells here (because it's a 3x3 grid), we can simply fill out all of those 3 cells safely:

Next clue on the top: 2. Again through logic we can determine that at least the cell in the middle is definitely filled:

Now let's continue with the clues on the left, starting with the top one: 2. Here it's the same, there is definitely at least the middle cell filled, which is already the case so we can simply move on with the clue below it: 3. The row is already filled out so let's move on to the next one: 2. Again, nothing to do. It turns out that we have a pretty rare case here where two solutions are correct:

or

Both solutions fulfill the requirements.

I hope this helped you grasp the game a little bit. Now you can try to apply some of what you learned on a small grid like 3x3 or 5x5 by simply passing the grid size as a command line argument to the program: yayagram 3 or yayagram 5 respectively.

You can also load the above grid into the game by passing this file as a command line argument to the binary: example.yaya.