How to play Queens

Queens is a logic puzzle on a square grid split into colored regions. Place crowns so that every row, every column and every color holds exactly one, and no two crowns touch. Every board has exactly one answer, and you can reach it by reasoning alone.

In Logic Legends the crowns are heroes: a war banner for Guan Yu, a shield for Lancelot, a feather fan for Zhuge Liang. The rules are the same.

The rules

One crown in every row.
One crown in every column.
One crown in every colored region.
Crowns never touch, not even diagonally.

A board of size 6 has six rows, six columns and six colors, so a solved board holds exactly six crowns. Boards in Logic Legends run from 6×6 to 10×10.

A solved 6×6 board: one crown per row, column and color, none touching.

What one crown rules out

Every crown crosses out a big part of the board: the rest of its row, the rest of its column, the rest of its color, and the eight cells around it. None of those cells can ever hold a crown, so mark them with ×. Most of the solving is keeping track of which cells are still open.

One crown and everything it rules out (white ×).

Controls in Logic Legends

Tap a cell once to mark it ×. Tap the × to clear it.
Double-tap a cell to place a crown. The game checks it at once: a wrong crown turns into a red × and counts as a mistake.
Drag across cells to mark several × in one stroke.
When a crown lands, the cells it rules out are crossed out for you. At the start of a board this happens one rule at a time, so you can see where each × comes from.
Hint explains the next deduction in plain words and outlines the cells it uses. It doesn't just show the answer.

Your first moves

Every board starts from one crown. Either it is already on the board, or one color has a single cell, which must hold a crown: the game rings that cell in gold and you place it. From there:

Cross out everything the first crown rules out.
Look for a row, column or color with one open cell left. That cell must hold the crown. This is Last Cell, and it carries most easy boards a long way.
When no cell is forced, look at where a color's open cells sit. If they all share one row, the rest of that row is ruled out. That is Confinement.

The harder techniques, and when you need them, are in the technique guide.

Queens, Star Battle and the eight queens

Queens is the one-star form of Star Battle, a grid puzzle in which bigger boards ask for two or three stars in every row, column and region. LinkedIn's daily game made the name Queens popular. It shares a name, but not its rules, with the eight queens problem from chess: there, queens attack along whole rows, columns and diagonals and there are no regions. Here only touching cells count as attacked, and the colored regions do the rest.

How hard does it get?

Each board is graded by the hardest step it needs. Easy boards need only Last Cell and Confinement, Medium adds Squeeze, Hard adds Pigeonhole, and Expert needs What-if. The daily puzzle is gentle on weekdays and tougher on Sundays. In the story sagas, the first level teaches and the boards turn Medium from the second.