Queens Puzzle Tips: How to Solve It Faster (Free Crowns)
13 October 2026 · 2 min read
The Queens puzzle gets faster once you stop looking for the answer and start looking for what cannot be. These Queens puzzle tips work on every grid, and you can practise them on Crowns, the free version on PuzzleDose.
The rules in one breath
The board is split into colored regions. You place exactly one crown (a queen, in the original) in every row, every column and every region, and no two crowns may touch, not even diagonally. Every board has exactly one solution, and logic is always enough to find it.
Four tips that make you faster
- Start with the smallest region. A region with one or two squares often shows right away where its crown goes.
- Cross out as soon as you place. After each crown, mark its whole row and column and the squares touching it. Every new cross often lets you rule out more.
- Use the region trick. If all the open squares of a region sit in one row or column, cross out every other square in that row or column, even outside the region.
- Look at the edges and corners. They have fewer neighbours, so they are usually the most restricted.
Try these tips on today's Crowns
How the controls work
Tap a square once to mark it with a cross, tap again to place a crown, tap a third time to clear it. On a computer you can also click and drag across several squares to fill them with crosses in one go.
When you are stuck
Do not stare at one spot. Count how many squares each region still has and look for the region with the fewest. If two regions share only the same two rows, they have taken those rows, so crosses go in every other region's squares in those rows. And if you really need a nudge, the hint button places one crown for you and tells you which region that row's crown belongs in.
Queens is LinkedIn's game and PuzzleDose is not affiliated with it; Crowns is inspired by it and has its own boards every day. Once you are fast, give Binario or Tectonic a go for the same kind of pure logic.
