Colour hanjie are an intriguing variant on the standard black-and-white version of this fantastic logic puzzle (which you may also know as nonograms, griddler, pic-a-cross and many more names besides!)

There is one key rule difference between hanjie and the colour version. This is that segments of different colours in a row or column CAN touch in colour hanjie, whereas segments of the same colour CANNOT. So the following combinations are valid:

The fact that cells can be in more than two different states in colour hanjie (for instance empty, filled black or filled red rather than just empty-or-filled in orthodox hanjie) means that there is more information you need to keep track of in colour hanjie. And the key strategy to successfully solving this puzzle, therefore, is to keep track of which different colour options can be placed in a certain cell. This can often lead you to make deductions when precious little about a region is known. For instance, look at this situation:

Here we can see instantly that several cells in the first horizontal region cannot contain the single light green cell in that region by simple cross-referencing with the vertical regions. Any of those that begin with a different colour clearly cannot be light green. Here all the regions that start with a red cell have been coloured in to illustrate this point and show the cells that cannot be where the single light green cell is placed in the first row of the puzzle, as they must either be empty or filled red.

So keeping track of which colours can go in which cells is the other key piece of strategy you will need in your logical armoury whilst solving this fascinating and absorbing puzzle. Once you are up on the rules, then why not try our online colour hanjie below by clicking on the link below to play online?

Colour Hanjie