Queens Answer Today (October 19, 2026)

Reading the solved board

The board at the top of the page shows today's regions with a crown in each, drawn by HintSheet from the solution data rather than photographed. Beneath it is a five-step method — the same short checklist every day, not a cell-by-cell solution — covering the smallest region, regions confined to a line, eliminating around each crown, the two-regions-two-rows lock and finishing by elimination. Use it with the drawn board: find the place on today's board where each step applies, and you will have found the order in which the crowns are forced. The first forced crown is always in a region with only one legal cell left; if you placed a crown anywhere else first and then had to backtrack, that is the habit to change.

Crowns are marked on their cells and region borders are drawn as heavy lines; eliminated cells are not drawn, to keep the board readable. When this page or the guide refers to a cell, rows are counted top to bottom from one and columns left to right from one.

The four deductions, in the order they fire

Every Queens board is solved by the same four moves. The walkthrough names them as it goes; here they are in one place.

• Single cell: a region with one cell has its crown there. The row, column and eight neighbours are eliminated. In our archive (3 September – 10 October 2026) 9 of 36 boards had a one-cell region, seven of them on a Monday or Tuesday.
• Confined region: a region whose cells all lie in one row (or column) owns that row; no other region can have a crown there, so every other region's cells in that row are dead.
• Two regions, two rows: if two regions between them occupy only two rows, those rows are theirs, and all other regions' cells in those two rows are eliminated. The same holds for three regions in three rows and for columns.
• Neighbour elimination: a crown removes the eight cells around it. It sounds trivial, but on a large board it is the move that turns a five-cell region into a one-cell region, and the diagonal neighbours are the easiest ones to forget.

Board sizes and the week

In our archive Queens boards ran from 7×7 to 9×9. LinkedIn does not publish a difficulty rating, but over the 36 boards from 3 September to 10 October 2026 the pattern was steady: 7×7 or 8×8 on Monday and Tuesday, mostly 8×8 from Wednesday to Friday, and 9×9 every Saturday and Sunday. The number at the top of this page is LinkedIn's puzzle number, which rose by one a day across the archive, and the date is the Pacific-time date of release: LinkedIn's help pages say every game's new puzzle goes live at midnight Pacific Time, which is 07:00 UTC during daylight saving time and 08:00 UTC outside it.

Board shape changes the value of the deductions. One-cell and confined regions were common early in the week: 7 of the 10 Monday and Tuesday boards had a one-cell region. None of the 10 weekend 9×9s did, and on 7 of them no region was confined to a single row or column, so the two-regions-two-rows move and neighbour elimination carry more of the solve. Neighbour elimination has to be applied deliberately rather than by eye on a bigger board, because a crown in the middle removes cells in regions you are not looking at.

Common wrong turns

The board's largest region is the eye-catching one and the worst place to start. It has the most cells, so it has the most possible crowns, and a crown placed in it early is a guess. The correct instinct is the opposite: ignore the big regions, find the smallest, and let the eliminations shrink the big ones until they too have one cell left. The second wrong turn is placing a crown that satisfies the row and column rules and forgetting the diagonal rule; LinkedIn's Auto-check setting highlights rule violations, but a player working ahead in their head can build three moves on a crown that touches another. The third is misreading a region border where two regions have similar shades; check the heavy border lines before you commit.

None of these are knowledge problems. They are habits, and the fastest fix is to solve a run of archived boards while consciously naming the deduction before each crown.

A note on time

LinkedIn shows a score on the results page and compares it with averages for all members, your company, CEOs and more.

A good Queens result is not about seeing crowns faster. It is about never placing one you have to remove. Place only crowns that are forced, and the board is solved once.— From the Queens guide on HintSheet

How the answer gets here, and where to go next

The solved board comes from structured puzzle data fetched by an automated pipeline that first runs shortly after midnight Pacific and retries during the day if the data isn't available yet — details on the editorial policy page — and the board here is rendered from that data. The step-by-step method is written for this site. The Queens guide works through each deduction on real boards, the Queens solver will solve any board you paint into it, and the archive keeps the puzzles published here since September 2026, by number, for practice. The other LinkedIn logic games — Tango, Zip and Mini Sudoku — each have their own daily page in the same format.

What the puzzle number tells you

Queens numbers its puzzles in sequence, and the number at the top of this page is LinkedIn's own. It is also the key the archive uses, so a search for a specific number lands on that day's board. Within our archive the numbers run one per day from #856 on 3 September 2026 to #893 on 10 October 2026. Numbers also let you line boards up against the week: in that window every board numbered on a Saturday or Sunday was a 9×9, and the smallest boards, the 7×7s, fell between Monday and Wednesday.

Practising with purpose

A solved board is only useful as practice if you know what you are practising. The site's suggestion is to pick one deduction per week. In the first week, before every crown you place on an archived board, say which deduction justifies it; if you cannot name one, do not place it. In the second week, work only from the smallest region and refuse to look at the largest until it is forced. In the third, apply the two-regions-two-rows move deliberately on every board, even when it is not needed, until you see it without looking for it. The point is to make the forced order a habit rather than something you find by backtracking.

The solver is the other practice tool. Paint an archived board into the Queens solver after you have solved it by hand and check your crowns against its answer; then, for any crown you got wrong, find the region or line that forced the right one. Where your board diverged is where your habit differs from the forced order, and that is the only kind of feedback that changes a habit.

The two-regions-two-rows move, slowly

It is the deduction that is easiest to overlook and the one that opens larger boards, so it is worth stating with care. Suppose regions A and B, between them, have cells only in rows 4 and 5 — every cell of A and every cell of B lies in one of those two rows. A needs a crown and B needs a crown, and each crown must be in its own row, so A and B will use rows 4 and 5 between them. That means no other region can have its crown in row 4 or row 5, and every cell of every other region in those rows is dead. The same holds for columns, and for three regions confined to three rows. On a 9×9, where other regions may have several cells in each of those rows, this one observation can clear much of two rows before any crown is placed — which is why the method's fourth step is an elimination rather than a placement.

The reverse also holds and is easier to miss: if rows 4 and 5 contain cells of only two regions, those regions own those rows. Look for both forms — regions confined to rows, and rows confined to regions — and the weekend boards stop being weekend boards.

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