How do you play Queens?

Queens is a logic puzzle on a grid of coloured regions. You place one queen in every row, every column and every colour, and no two queens may touch, not even diagonally. Every puzzle has exactly one solution, and you can always reach it by logic without guessing.

The three rules

1. One queen in every row and every column. A 6×6 board has six queens, a 10×10 board has ten.
2. One queen in every colour. There are as many coloured regions as there are rows.
3. Queens never touch. Two queens can't sit on neighbouring tiles, including corner to corner.

The controls

• Tap once to mark a tile as ruled out (a dot).
• Tap twice to place a queen. Tap a third time to clear the tile.
• Drag across tiles to mark several at once. On a computer, right-click places a queen straight away.

On this website, tiles a queen rules out are marked for you. If you're stuck, Hint shows the next logical step and explains why it works.

A worked example

Here is a complete 5×5 puzzle solved from start to finish. Rows are numbered from the top and columns from the left.

queenalready ruled outplay herecross out nowtiles to look at

1. Step 1

   The emerald colour is a single tile, so its queen has to go there.

2. Step 2

   The pearl colour has only one open tile left, so its queen goes there.

3. Step 3

   Column 1 has only one open tile left, so its queen goes there.

4. Step 4

   Row 5 has only one open tile left, so its queen goes there.

5. Step 5

   Row 3 has only one open tile left, so its queen goes there.

That's the whole puzzle: 5 queens, one in every row, column and colour, with none touching.

Where next?

• Queens for beginners: the three habits that solve most easy boards.
• All six solving techniques, with an example of each.
• Today's Daily Crown: three new boards every day.