How to solve LinkedIn Queens

Queens is a logic game on a colored grid. On the 12 past boards on this site, the four steps below placed every queen without guessing. This guide gives the rules, that method, and one finished board solved step by step with the same reasoning the Queens pages on this site use.

The rules

LinkedIn’s Help Center lists two rules. Each row, column and colored region must hold exactly one Crown symbol (a queen). Crowns cannot sit in adjacent cells, and that includes diagonals.

The game gives you tools too. Tapping a cell cycles between empty, a mark, and a crown; the mark is for squares that cannot hold a crown. The Hint button highlights a region where a crown must go, or shows incorrect placements. In Settings, Auto-check highlights rule violations and “Auto-place X’s” marks invalid cells for you.

On this site, the past boards are 7x7 (5 of the 12 boards from #909 to #920), 8x8 (4) and 9x9 (3). Each of these boards has as many color regions as it has rows.

The method

Work in this order. Each step uses only what is already on the board.

1. Find a unit with one open square. If a region, a row or a column has only one square left where a queen can go, put the queen there. A queen also closes its row, its column, its region and the eight squares around it. Mark those as blocked.
2. Look for a region that sits inside one row or one column. If every open square of a region is in the same row, that region’s queen must be in that row, so no other region can use any other square of it. The same goes for a column.
3. Look for groups of regions. If the open squares of two regions all fall in the same two rows, those two rows belong to them, and every other square in those rows is out. The same goes for three regions in three rows, and for columns.
4. Test a square. Imagine a queen on it. If that would leave some region, row or column with no open square at all, the square is out.

Counting the squares in each region helps. On 9 of the 12 past boards the starting region the page names is one of the smallest on the board. It is not a rule: on #918 below the page starts with Purple, which has 10 squares while the smallest region has 4, because the first move there comes from a group of regions.

A finished board: Queens #918

Here is Queens #918 from Nov 4, a 7x7 board. The letters are regions. The color names below are the labels this site gives them, in order, and may not match the shades on your screen: A is Purple, B Orange, C Blue, D Green, E Yellow, F Red, G Pink.

A A A A B B B   row 1
A A A C D D B   row 2
A A E C D D D   row 3
A F E C C D D   row 4
G F E E D D D   row 5
G F F D D D D   row 6
G G D D D D D   row 7

Regions A, E, F and G only use columns 1 to 4, and there are exactly four of them, so those four columns belong to them. The solver on this site lists the steps like this, row and column counted from 1:

• Step 1: The Purple, Yellow, Red and Pink regions sit entirely in columns 1, 2, 3 and 4, so no other queen can go in those columns. The Blue region has only one open square left, so its queen goes in row 4, column 5.
• Step 2: Column 4 has only one open square left, so its queen goes in row 1 (Purple region).
• Step 3: The Orange region has only one open square left, so its queen goes in row 2, column 7.
• Step 4: Row 3 has only one open square left, so its queen goes in column 3 (Yellow region).
• Step 5: The Red region sits entirely in column 2, so no other queen can go in column 2. A queen in row 5, column 1 would leave the Red region with no open square, so that square is out. Row 5 has only one open square left, so its queen goes in column 2 (Red region).
• Step 6: The Pink region has only one open square left, so its queen goes in row 7, column 1.
• Step 7: The Green region has only one open square left, so its queen goes in row 6, column 6.

Step 1 is a group of regions (method step 3). Step 5 uses a region inside one column (method step 2) and then a square test (method step 4). Every other step is method step 1.

A bigger board: Queens #919

Queens #919 from Nov 5 is a 9x9 board, the largest size in the record. Letters are regions again, using the site’s labels: A Purple, B Orange, C Blue, D Green, E Yellow, F Red, G Pink, H Teal, I Gray.

A A A A A B B B B   row 1
A A C C C C C C B   row 2
A A A D C C E E E   row 3
F F A D C C E E E   row 4
F G A D H H H H H   row 5
F G A D H H H H H   row 6
I G A D H H H H H   row 7
I G G D H H H H H   row 8
I I I D H H H H H   row 9

Teal fills the lower right with 25 squares, and a first look at it gets you nowhere. The way in is the narrow regions. Green runs down column 4 and nowhere else, so column 4 is Green’s. Red, Pink and Gray together sit in columns 1 to 3, so those columns belong to those three regions. The solver’s first step says exactly that, and it also finds that the Purple region has one open square left, so its queen goes in row 1, column 5. Step 2 puts the Orange queen in row 2, column 9: the Purple queen closes row 1, and that leaves Orange one open square.

The middle of the board is where the square test earns its place. Step 5 rules out five squares, each because a queen there would leave Red, Pink or Gray with no open square. Only then does Pink have one open square left, in row 7, column 2. Teal’s queen comes last, in row 8, column 7, the one open square left in its region. In all, #919 took nine steps.

Where people get stuck

These are the places this guide’s method is built to catch.

• Starting with the biggest region. A large region such as Teal in #919 has too many options to force anything. Look at the narrow ones first: on 91 of the 119 boards from July 11 to November 6, the region the solver starts from is one of the smallest on the board.
• Forgetting the diagonals. The Help Center says crowns cannot sit in adjacent cells, including diagonally. A queen closes the eight squares around it, and a square that touches one diagonally is out.
• Banning too much. Two queens farther apart on a diagonal are fine. Only touching is forbidden. Mark the eight neighbors, not the whole diagonal line.
• Missing a region that sits in one column or row. If you cannot find a move, check each region’s squares: do they all share a row or a column? Green in #919 does, and that is the whole first move.
• Never trying a square. On 64 of the 119 boards the solver needed the square test at least once, and on 92 of them the first step is a deduction that rules out squares rather than placing a queen. If placing seems impossible, test a square.
• Guessing. On the 119 boards, every one has exactly one solution, and the solver needed no guess on any. If you have to guess, a rule has been missed.

When you are truly stuck, the Hint button in the game highlights a region where a crown must go. On this site, open the Starting region reveal on the board page and leave the full solution closed.

How far does the method go?

On the 12 past boards on this site, #909 to #920, these four steps placed every queen without guessing. The solver also has a fallback for a board that the rules cannot finish: it says so in the step instead of inventing a reason. It has not been needed on these 12.

To practise, open Queens #917 or #916 and cover the steps; #916 starts with a one-square region. The full list is in the Queens archive. Today’s board and its start-here hint are on the Queens page.

This site is not affiliated with LinkedIn, and you cannot play the game here. How the pages are made and checked is on the method page.