Puzzles are truly a worldwide phenomenon. So many different cultures and groups have created fantastic, long-lasting puzzle styles that continue to resonate across decades and even centuries.

In the past I’ve endeavored to make PuzzleNation Blog a bit more PuzzleInternational by sharing overseas puzzle flavors from German and Spanish puzzle books that’ve been passed to me by fellow puzzlers.

And I’m so excited that another friend of the blog has shared an absolute treasure trove of international puzzle books with me, ensuring that our puzzly world tour will continue!

So today, instead of examining a single puzzle book and getting a glimpse into a particular culture’s brand of puzzles, I’ve picked a particular type of puzzle and we’ll be exploring magazines from several different countries dedicated to that puzzle!

Let’s take a global look at Logic Art!

Logic Art puzzles (also known as Pixel Puzzles, Pic-a-Pix, Illust-Logic, Griddlers, Hanjie, and Picture Puzzles) are a wonderfully artistic take on deduction-style logic puzzles.

Essentially, you’re given an empty grid with numbers along the top and left-hand side. These numbers indicate black squares to color in and white squares to leave alone. By deducing where to place the black squares and white squares, a pixelated picture will emerge!

(For more complete rules and solving tips, check out this helpful guide from our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles.)

So, the difficulty of the solve and creativity of the solution image are only limited by the puzzle constructor’s imagination and your own puzzle savvy.

Some magazines, like these German puzzle books, stick to the simple black square/white square mechanic…

… while others, like this Cyrillic magazine with several colors and this Hungarian magazine with splashes of red, encourage greater use of color in your Logic Artwork.

These smaller, digest-sized Cyrillic magazines offer multiple grids per page with simpler solution images.

But look at the level of detail some of the larger grids offer!

I must admit, though, I’m partial to these Japanese puzzle books, if only for this particular solution image:

Logic Art is obviously a puzzle with global appeal. Although not as universal as Sudoku (or as intuitively easy to solve), it clearly strikes a chord with solvers across the world.

It’s always a treat to explore puzzles from another culture’s perspective. Thanks for taking this journey with me today.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!