What are the rules of the Queens puzzle?
The grid is divided into coloured regions, as many as there are rows. Place one crown in every row, one in every column and one in every region. No two crowns may touch, not even diagonally. Each puzzle has exactly one answer, and you can reach it by reasoning alone, with no guessing.
Choose a 7 × 7, 8 × 8 or 9 × 9 grid. Tap a square to place a crown, and tap it again to take the crown away. To note that a square can't hold a crown, switch “Tap places” to Cross. With “Show ruled out” on, every square a crown rules out shows a faint cross; take the crown away and its crosses go with it. The regions are outlined with thick lines as well as coloured, so the puzzle never depends on telling colours apart.
How do you solve Queens?
- Start with the smallest regions. A region of one square is a crown already; one of two or three squares in a line rules out the rest of that line.
- Find regions that fit inside one row or column. That row's crown must be in the region, so every other square of the row can be crossed out.
- Count in pairs. Two regions that fit inside the same two rows take both rows' crowns, so the rest of those rows is empty.
- Test a square against its neighbours. A crown rules out the eight squares around it; if that would leave some region with nowhere to go, the square can't hold a crown.
How is your Queens Puzzle time calculated?
Your result is the time from Start until every crown is placed without breaking a rule. Beside it are the times you used Check, which marks a crown or cross in the wrong place, and Hint, which places one crown (or removes a wrong one). Crosses are only notes. There is no rating: no published typical time exists for puzzles built like these.
Does every Queens puzzle have exactly one answer?
Yes. The 120 puzzles here were made ahead of time: crowns placed at random, a region grown around each, and the regions reshaped until a solver using only the moves above could place every crown. The site's tests solve every stored puzzle again and count its answers by trying every placement: exactly one each time.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's Queens?
It follows the same rules as the Queens game LinkedIn added in 2024, and those rules are older: they are the one-star version of Star Battle, a pencil puzzle in which you place stars the same way. The puzzles here are this site's own, and you can play as many as you like. Our Star Battle page has the same rules with stars and outlines only, on smaller grids.
The name comes from chess: the eight queens puzzle asks for eight queens on a chessboard with none attacking another. A chess queen attacks along whole diagonals, though, while a crown here only rules out the squares touching it. For another grid of pure reasoning, try Sudoku.