Queens puzzle online: a free daily 8×8 plus unlimited 6×6 to 12×12 boards, no ads. One queen per row, column and colour region, each with one solution.
- Genre
- Puzzle
- Players
- Single player
- Devices
- Phone and desktop
- Daily
- A new puzzle every day
- Price
- Free, plays in the browser, nothing to install
How to play
Touch: tap a cell to cycle empty → × → queen. Mark/Queen button sets what a tap does; Auto marks the cells a queen rules out; Undo, Clear and Hint on the bar. Keyboard: arrows to move, Space/Enter to cycle, X to mark, Q for a queen, Backspace to empty a cell, U undo, H hint, M mode, A auto-mark, Esc for the menu. Mouse: left click cycles, right click marks.
New in v1.5
A new catalog cover, drawn by the game itself.
How to play
Queens is played on a square grid divided into coloured regions. An n×n board has n regions.
- Place exactly one queen in every row.
- Place exactly one queen in every column.
- Place exactly one queen in every coloured region.
- No two queens may touch, not even diagonally. Queens further apart on a diagonal are allowed.
When all of these hold, every row, column and region has its queen and the puzzle is solved.
Strategy
Mark what a queen rules out. A queen removes its whole row, its whole column, its whole region and the eight cells around it. Crossing these out is the main tool. On this site the Auto option does it for you.
Small regions first. A region with only one or two cells has very few choices. A one cell region is a free queen. A region of two cells side by side has its queen in that row or column, so the rest of that line is out.
Regions inside a line. If a region sits entirely in one row, its queen is in that row, so every other region's cells in that row are crossed. The same holds for columns.
Counting regions in lines. If two regions are confined to the same two rows, those two rows belong to them, and every other region must stay out of those rows. This extends to three regions in three rows, and so on.
Shared attack. If every possible cell for a region touches or lines up with some cell, that cell can be crossed, because whichever queen goes in the region would rule it out.
Touching rule near pairs. Two candidate cells next to each other in a region cannot both hold queens. Use this with the line rules to remove whole blocks of cells.
Last cell standing. When a row, column or region has a single open cell, the queen goes there. Then update the marks and look again.
History
Queens grows out of the eight queens puzzle, a chess problem from the 1840s: place eight queens on a chessboard so that none attacks another. The modern version replaces long diagonals with a no touching rule and adds coloured regions, much like the Star Battle puzzle with one star per line. It became widely popular as a daily game on LinkedIn.
Playing on Summoned Games
Pick 6×6 (easy), 8×8 (classic), 9×9 (medium), 10×10 (hard) or 12×12 (expert). Each puzzle is generated when you start, so you never run out, and every one has exactly one solution. Smaller boards favour puzzles the basic marking rules solve on their own. 10×10 and 12×12 prefer ones that need deeper reasoning. The daily puzzle is an 8×8 that is the same for everyone that day, and solving it on consecutive days builds a streak.
On a phone, tap a cell to go from empty to a mark to a queen. The Mark/Queen button lets taps place queens directly. With Auto on, each queen crosses out the cells it rules out. Clear wipes the board. Queens that clash turn red. On a desktop, right click places a mark, the arrow keys move the cursor, Space or Enter cycles, X marks, Q places a queen, Backspace clears a cell, M switches mode, A toggles Auto, H gives a hint, U or Ctrl+Z undoes and Escape opens the menu.
Hint removes a wrong queen if there is one, otherwise places a correct queen. Placing a queen in a cell that is not part of the solution counts as a mistake right away. Progress saves automatically. Every win goes on the puzzles solved leaderboard, and 8×8 times, including the daily, go on the fastest 8×8 board.
FAQ
Can queens touch diagonally? No. Queens may not touch in any direction. Two queens on the same diagonal but further apart are fine.
Is this the same as the LinkedIn Queens game? The rules are the same: one queen per row, column and colour region, and no touching. The puzzles here are generated by this game, with a daily 8×8 and unlimited extra boards.
Does every puzzle have exactly one solution? Yes. The generator grows the colour regions while checking uniqueness, then confirms the finished puzzle has a single answer.
What counts as a mistake? Placing a queen on a cell that is not in the solution. Marks never count as mistakes.
What does Auto do? It crosses out every cell a placed queen rules out: its row, column, region and the cells touching it. Turn it off if you prefer to mark by hand.
