Queens: a strategy guide
Queens belongs to the same family as the classic eight-queens chess problem, but with a twist that turns it from a maths curiosity into a genuine daily puzzle: the board is carved into irregular coloured regions, and each region needs exactly one crown too.
That third constraint is what makes it solvable by pure logic. With rows and columns alone there are hundreds of valid arrangements. Add the colour regions and the daily board has exactly one — which means you never have to guess, and every crown you place can be justified.
The rules, restated
- Place exactly one crown in every row.
- Place exactly one crown in every column.
- Place exactly one crown in every coloured region.
- No two crowns may touch, including diagonally. A crown blocks all eight neighbouring cells.
- Tapping a cell cycles it: empty, then X (your own note), then crown, then empty again.
- Drag across cells to place X marks quickly — useful for sweeping out a row you have just eliminated.
- A crown that breaks a rule glows red immediately, so you always know when a deduction went wrong.
- The timer starts on your first tap and stops the moment the board is solved.
A worked example
Suppose one colour region on an 8×8 board occupies only three cells, and all three sit in the same row. That region must contain a crown, so the crown for that region is in that row — and since a row holds exactly one crown, every other cell in that row is now an X.
That single observation usually cascades. The cells you just eliminated may have been the last remaining candidates for a neighbouring region, which pins that region's crown too, which eliminates another row and column, and so on.
The reverse deduction is just as useful: if a region is the only one covering a particular column, then that column's crown belongs to that region, and every cell of that region outside the column can be marked off.
Reading the regions before you place anything
Strong Queens players spend the first thirty seconds not placing crowns but reading shapes. Count the cells in each region and note which rows and columns each one spans. A region spanning one row, one column, or a tight two-by-two block is a lever; a snaking region across five rows is nearly free information at the start and will only become useful later.
It also pays to notice the corners. A region that owns a corner cell has an unusually cheap crown position, because a corner touches only three neighbours instead of eight. Boards are generated to make this a real consideration rather than a guaranteed answer, but corners are always worth checking early.
The last piece of pre-reading is the pigeonhole check: if some set of k regions collectively occupies only k rows, those k rows are entirely consumed by those regions, and every other region must place its crown elsewhere. This sounds abstract but shows up on most boards in the two-region form, which is easy to spot by eye.
The solving loop
Once you start placing, work in a strict loop. Place a crown only when a cell is forced. Immediately mark its row, its column, its region, and all eight neighbours. Then re-scan every region you touched to see whether any of them is now down to a single candidate cell. Repeat.
The discipline matters because Queens punishes half-finished bookkeeping. An unmarked diagonal neighbour is invisible to you but perfectly visible to the rule check, and the resulting red glow arrives several moves after the actual mistake. Marking as you go turns debugging into deduction.
When the loop stalls — nothing is forced anywhere — go back to counting. Pick a row with the fewest open cells and ask which regions those cells belong to. Pick a region with the fewest open cells and ask which rows they sit in. One of those two questions almost always breaks the deadlock.
Common mistakes
Treating it as chess. Queens here do not attack along ranks and diagonals indefinitely; the no-touching rule is strictly adjacent cells. Players who import chess intuition eliminate far too much and end up with a board that has no solution at all.
Placing a crown because it looks likely. Likely is not forced, and one speculative crown will contradict itself ten moves later with no obvious way back. Use X marks to record uncertainty instead.
Ignoring the column constraint while focusing on regions. It is easy to get absorbed in colour logic and finish with two crowns stacked in one column. Scan columns explicitly every few moves.
Quick reference
Start with the smallest regions — A region of two or three cells constrains the board far more than a sprawling one. Solve the tight regions first and the loose ones resolve themselves.
Look for regions trapped in one row or column — If every cell of a region shares a row, that row is spoken for. This is the single most productive pattern in the game.
Mark aggressively — X marks are free and they are what turns a hard board into an easy one. Drag through whole rows the moment you have eliminated them.
Remember the diagonal — The no-touching rule is the constraint players forget. After each crown, mark all eight neighbours before moving on.
Never guess — Every daily board has a unique solution reachable by deduction alone. If you find yourself picking between two options at random, there is a mark you have not made yet.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the daily board always solvable without guessing?
- Yes. The generator verifies with a backtracking solver that the board has exactly one solution before it is published.
- How big is the grid?
- Eight by eight, with eight colour regions — one crown per row, per column and per region.
- Can I replay the same board?
- Yes, there is a replay button that resets the grid so you can try for a faster time. Your recorded result for the day is the first solve.
- Does the phone vibrate?
- Light haptic feedback fires when you place or erase marks during a drag, on devices that support it. It follows your system settings.