LinkedIn Queens: rules, origin and what the boards look like

Queens is the logic game on LinkedIn. You get a square grid split into colored regions, and you place one queen in every row, every column and every region, with no two queens touching. This guide covers where Queens came from, how it relates to the old chess puzzle of the same name, the rules and the tools LinkedIn gives you, and what 119 past boards show about their size and shape. To learn a method for solving boards, read how to solve LinkedIn Queens. This site is not affiliated with LinkedIn.

Where Queens came from

Queens launched on May 1, 2024, with Pinpoint and Crossclimb, as one of the first three LinkedIn games. LinkedIn’s launch post described it this way: “Queens is a logic game that challenges players to fill each row, column and colored region in the grid with a ‘queen’ – but none can touch each other.” The longer story of all eight games is in the LinkedIn games guide.

By October 2024 it had become the most popular of the three. CNBC wrote that Queens “has emerged as the hottest of the trio” and called it the most popular of the first three. It named Thomas Snyder, who won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship, as “the game’s architect”, and quoted him describing the format as “a little bit sudoku-like”. CNBC also reported that LinkedIn’s Lakshman Somasundaram had begun posting daily videos with the solutions to Queens puzzles in July 2024, on a page dedicated to the game.

Queens and the eight queens puzzle

The name comes from a chess problem. The eight queens puzzle asks you to place eight chess queens on an 8×8 board so that no two share a row, a column or a diagonal. Max Bezzel published it in 1848, and it has 92 solutions.

LinkedIn’s game keeps one queen per row and column and changes two things. It adds colored regions, each of which must hold exactly one queen. And it forbids only touching: the Help Center says crowns cannot be placed in adjacent cells, including diagonally. Two queens farther apart on the same diagonal are allowed. On this site’s database, every board from #909 to #920 has at least one such pair in its solution. On #912, four queens sit on one diagonal line: row 1 column 8, row 3 column 6, row 6 column 3 and row 8 column 1. A chess queen would attack along that line, but in this game they do not.

The rules and the tools

The Help Center’s Queens page states the rules:

• Each row, column and colored region must contain exactly one Crown symbol (the queen).
• Crown symbols cannot be placed in adjacent cells, including diagonally.
• Click or tap a cell to toggle between empty, a marked symbol and a Crown. The mark is for cells that cannot hold a Crown.

If you are stuck, the page lists these tools:

• Hint highlights a region where a Crown must go, or points out incorrect placements.
• Auto-check, in Settings, highlights rule violations. If you place too many Crowns, the affected cells get red stripes.
• Auto-place X’s, in Settings, marks invalid cells for you based on your Crown placements.
• Undo removes your last placement, and Clear removes all Crowns and marks.

What 119 past boards look like

To see what Queens boards are like, we analyzed a public record of the daily puzzles, the linkedin-games-archive on GitHub. It covers July 11 to November 6, 2026: 119 boards, which are #802 to #920, one per day with no gaps. It is a third-party record, so the counts below are of the boards it lists.

Every board in the record is a square grid with as many regions as it has rows. There are three sizes: 7×7 on 32 boards, 8×8 on 34 and 9×9 on 53. The size follows the day of the week:

Day	7×7	8×8	9×9	Boards
Monday	14	2	1	17
Tuesday	10	6	1	17
Wednesday	8	7	2	17
Thursday	0	10	7	17
Friday	0	9	8	17
Saturday	0	0	17	17
Sunday	0	0	17	17

Every Saturday and Sunday board in the record was 9×9, and no 7×7 board appeared after Wednesday. Monday leaned small: 14 of its 17 boards were 7×7. LinkedIn does not state this schedule in the Help Center pages we read, so treat it as a pattern in about 17 weeks of boards, not a rule. (The same record tags 40 boards, all on Fridays through Sundays, as “HARD”. We could not trace that label to LinkedIn, so we do not rely on it.)

Region sizes vary a lot. The smallest region on a board had one square on 27 boards, two squares on 37, three on 29, four on 17 and five on 9. A one-square region hands you a queen for free: Queens #916 is an example, where the Purple region is a single square in the top right corner.

Anatomy of one board: Queens #919

Take Queens #919 from November 5, a 9×9 board. It has nine regions that cover 81 squares, and they are very unequal. The Teal region is the biggest, with 25 squares. After it come Purple with 14, Blue with 10 and Green with 7, then Yellow with 6, Orange, Pink and Gray with 5 each, and Red with 4.

Size is not what makes a region useful. The Green region has 7 squares, but all of them sit in column 4, so the queen of column 4 has to be Green’s queen. Red, Pink and Gray together sit in columns 1 to 3, which leaves those three columns to those three regions and closes them to everyone else. Teal is the largest region and the last one to be placed, because it has so many squares that nothing forces it until the others are down. The regions that give you moves are the small and narrow ones, and this board shows why a long, thin region deserves a look before a big one.

Questions about the rules

Do the rules change with the board size? The Help Center lists one set of rules and no size-specific ones. A 7×7 board and a 9×9 board are played the same way.

Can a board have more than one solution? Not in the record. Each of the 119 boards has exactly one.

Do I have to mark squares? No. Marks are a tool for cells that cannot hold a Crown. The Help Center’s rules say to use them to eliminate cells, and Auto-place X’s can add them for you.

Is a region always one connected shape? On all 119 boards in the record, yes. Each region is a single connected shape. The Help Center does not list this as a rule, so it is a pattern in the boards, not something to rely on.

How the boards can be solved

Each of the 119 boards has exactly one solution; we confirmed that by exhaustive search. We then ran each board through the solver this site uses to write its step-by-step pages. That solver tries simple deductions first: a region, row or column with one open square; a region confined to one row or column; groups of regions that share the same rows or columns; and the square test, which rules out a square when a queen there would leave some region, row or column with no open square.

• All 119 boards were explained with those rules alone. The solver’s fallback, which places the next queen from the answer when no rule applies, was never needed.
• On 92 boards, the first step is not a placement. You must rule out squares before any queen can go down. The other 27 are the boards with a one-square region.
• The solver used a row or column lock on 114 boards, a group of regions on 88, and the square test on 64. On 5 boards, plain placements were enough.
• The starting region that the solver names is one of the smallest regions on the board (ties count) on 91 of the 119 boards. On the other 28 it is not.

These figures describe the boards and this site’s solver, not LinkedIn’s own difficulty rating. They show that you never have to guess on these boards, and that the step you need first changes from day to day. The method guide walks through each type on finished boards.

Where to play Queens

You can start Queens from the Games hub at linkedin.com/games, from your Feed, from the My Network page, from the Today’s Games section under LinkedIn News on the desktop homepage, or from the side panel of the mobile app, according to the Help Center’s page on finding games. You can also play in guest mode without an account, though your score is deleted after 30 minutes and no streak is kept.

The games FAQ says the tutorials are translated to match your app’s language, and that Queens is one of five games, with Tango, Zip, Mini Sudoku and Patches, that are accessible in all supported languages. New boards appear at midnight Pacific Time, and the previous board expires then, which is why this site keeps the older ones in an archive.

Scoring and the streak

The Help Center’s Queens page does not publish a scoring formula or say that the game is timed. After you finish, it says the results page shows your score compared with averages for all members, your company, CEOs and others. Your Queens win also counts toward your streak, which the LinkedIn games guide explains, along with streak freezes and restoring a long streak.

Sharing and comparing

As for every LinkedIn game, you can post your score, send it to connections by message, or copy it from the results page (Help Center). TechCrunch noted at launch that your company affiliation appears on a leaderboard; the Help Center now describes a connections leaderboard and a company and school leaderboard, and lets you choose whether connections see your score.

Quick answers

Is there a prize? No. LinkedIn says there are no prizes for solving its games.

Can I play yesterday’s board? Not on LinkedIn. The previous board expires at midnight Pacific Time. Past boards are in the Queens archive here.

What does a crown mean? It is LinkedIn’s word for the queen. The Help Center’s rules say each row, column and colored region must have exactly one Crown symbol.

Does the size of the board change the number of regions? In the record, never: a 7×7 board had 7 regions, an 8×8 board 8 and a 9×9 board 9.

Queens on this site

You cannot play Queens here. Each board page shows the colored grid with no queen drawn, then lets you open three layers one at a time: a Starting region that names the region to look at first and why, Show queen 1 of n to reveal one queen with its step in words, and Show the full solution. The steps are the solver’s output described above.

Today’s board is on the Queens page. Earlier boards, grouped by month and each with its own page, are in the Queens archive. The other two games have their own guides: LinkedIn Pinpoint and Crossclimb on LinkedIn. How the pages are made and checked is on the method page.