Queens answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (26)

Rules worth rereading first

Before studying an old board, or starting today's, it is worth rereading the rule most mistakes come from, the diagonal-touch rule. Our Queens guide states the whole rule set in one line:

Place exactly one crown in every row, every column and every region, with the extra rule that no two crowns may touch, even diagonally.— HintSheet's LinkedIn Queens guide

Looking up a board by number or date

Queens puzzles are numbered, and the number goes up by one each day. If someone posts "Queens #880" in a group chat, scan the # column above, or type the number straight into the address bar after hintsheet.com/queens/ — every Queens day page uses the puzzle number as its address. If you only remember the day, the month headings group the list by calendar month and each date links to the same page.

A new row appears at the daily reset. Queens rolls over at midnight Pacific time, and that is when the new board is added to the top of the list; the previous day moves down one row. For players on the East Coast that is 3 a.m.

The archive begins with #856 on 3 September 2026. Two early days are not in it: 5 September (#858) and 11 September (#864). We don't hold those two boards, so they are skipped rather than filled with a guess. Every day from 12 September onward is present.

Sizes, small regions and corner crowns by weekday

Across the 36 Queens puzzles from 3 September to 10 October 2026 on HintSheet, boards came in three sizes: 7×7 (9 puzzles), 8×8 (13) and 9×9 (14). Every board had exactly as many coloured regions as rows. The sizes were not spread evenly across the week, and neither were the easy openings.

Tiny regions are the early-week gift

A one-cell region is a free crown: the region needs exactly one crown and has exactly one cell to hold it. Nine boards in the window had one, and seven of those nine were Monday or Tuesday puzzles. No Friday, Saturday or Sunday board had a one-cell region at all. Seventeen of the 36 boards had at least one region of two cells or fewer.

On the weekend boards the smallest region averaged close to four cells, so the first crown has to be earned through the row-and-column squeeze instead of being handed over. That is the practical difference between the two ends of the week: early boards tend to start with a placement, late boards with an elimination.

Large regions moved the other way. On 8×8 boards the largest region averaged 29.9 cells, close to half the board, and on #865 (12 September) a single region covered 45 of the 81 cells. A sprawling region looks intimidating, but it is usually the last one to resolve: once the small regions have claimed their rows and columns, the big one takes whatever is left.

One caution when you read the table: five or six boards per weekday is a small sample, and the pattern could shift as the archive grows. The window stated above the table is the one these counts describe; boards added since then appear in the list but not in the counts.

Reading a solved board after the fact

When you open an answer page, the crowns are already placed, which makes it tempting to glance and leave. Spend thirty seconds working backwards instead. Find the smallest region and ask why its crown had to go where it did. Then find any region that sits entirely inside one row or one column, because that region owns that line and clears it for everyone else.

Next, look at the two or three largest regions. On most stored boards they are where the crowns land last, squeezed into the only cells the other regions left open. If you can see that squeeze on a finished board, you will start seeing it on unsolved ones.

Five drills that use past boards

Studying old boards only helps if each session targets one skill. These five come straight from the counts above.

• Begin with a Monday. On a 7×7 Monday entry, find the one-cell or two-cell region and confirm its crown sits where the rules force it. Then make that region the first thing you look for on the next live board.
• Read one week in order. Monday through Sunday of the same week, side by side, shows the ramp in the table above more clearly than any description of it.
• Use weekends for the hard openings. No Saturday or Sunday board in the window had a one-cell region, so they are the right place to study the deductions that don't depend on a gift: a region confined to one row, or two regions sharing the same two columns.
• Test corners early. In 20 of the 36 boards, one crown sat in a corner cell. That is not a rule and you can't assume it, but a corner cell touches only three neighbours, so placing a crown there removes fewer candidates and it is worth checking when its row, column and region are short of options.
• Compare crown by crown. Each day page draws the finished board with its regions, so you can check every crown's cell, not just whether you finished. If your board differs, find the first region where your crown sits in a different cell; the deduction that placed it is the one to drill next.

When the board you remember looks different

Because the reset happens at midnight Pacific, players far from the Americas meet each puzzle on a different calendar day from the one we file it under. In Tokyo, for example, midnight Pacific in October falls in the late afternoon, so a puzzle played on a Tuesday morning there is still the Monday puzzle. If the date you search for shows an unfamiliar board, search by puzzle number instead; the number is the same everywhere.

The same applies to a board shared in a group chat after the fact. Screenshots usually show the puzzle number in the corner of the game, and that number is the fastest route to the matching entry here.

Beyond the archive

For the current board, use today's Queens answer page, which is replaced at each reset. If you are stuck on a board that isn't in the archive yet, the Queens solver accepts any layout from 5×5 to 11×11 and returns the crown placement. The Queens hub covers the full set of deductions with a worked board.

Frequently asked questions