How to play Queens
Queens is a logic puzzle on an eight by eight grid split into eight coloured regions. You place eight crowns, and four short rules decide where they go:
- Exactly one crown in every row.
- Exactly one crown in every column.
- Exactly one crown in every colour region.
- No two crowns may touch, not even at a corner.
Tap a square once to mark it as empty, again to place a crown, and again to clear it. The marks are just for you, so use them to keep track of squares you have ruled out. Use the arrow keys to move around and Backspace to clear a square.
Tips for beginners
- Start with the smallest region. A region of three or four squares has far fewer places to hide a crown than one that sprawls across the board.
- A region trapped in one row owns that row. If every square of a colour sits in the same row, that row's crown must be that colour, so the rest of the row is out.
- Remember the corners. Crowns cannot touch diagonally, which rules out far more squares than beginners expect. One crown clears up to eight neighbours.
- Mark as you go. Ruling squares out is how the answer appears. Turn on auto marks in Settings and each crown will cross out its own row, column, region and neighbours for you.
- Never guess. Every board here is checked so it can be finished by logic alone. If you are stuck, there is a deduction you have not made yet.
Where Queens comes from
Queens belongs to one of the oldest families in recreational maths: placing pieces on a board so that none of them can attack another.
- 1848 The Eight Queens problem Chess composer Max Bezzel asks how eight queens can stand on a chessboard without any two attacking each other. Franz Nauck publishes the first full set of answers in 1850.
- 1999 Cattle Dutch puzzle maker Tim Peeters invents Cattle, the region puzzle that Star Battle later grew from.
- 2003 Star Battle Hans Eendebak creates Star Battle for the World Puzzle Championship in Arnhem: stars in every row, column and region, and no two touching.
- Today Queens One crown per row, column and colour region. Newspapers also print a two-star version under the name Two Not Touch.
- Also known as
- Star Battle, Two Not Touch
- Puzzle family
- Placement logic
- Our board
- 8 by 8, eight regions
- What it trains
- Elimination and spatial thinking
Did you know? The original Eight Queens problem has 92 answers, or 12 if you count rotations and mirror images as the same. The coloured regions are what cut Queens down to exactly one.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's puzzle?
No. This is our own Queens, in the same crowns and regions style. Every board is generated here and checked two ways: that it has exactly one solution, and that the solution can be reached without guessing. The answers will not match any official daily answer. It is free, needs no account, and your streak is saved in your own browser.