A Queens solver that takes any board. Choose the grid size, pick a colour, tap cells to paint each region exactly as it appears in today's LinkedIn Queens, and press solve. It returns an arrangement of crowns that satisfies every rule, or tells you plainly that no arrangement fits the board you painted — which almost always means a cell was painted the wrong colour.
It exists for two situations. The first is the obvious one: you are stuck and would rather see the crowns than abandon the streak. The second is the more useful one: you finished, or nearly finished, and want to know which deduction you missed. Painting a board is quick; comparing the solver's crowns to your own scribbles is where the learning happens. If you want the deductions themselves spelled out, the Queens guide covers all four, and today's Queens answer shows the current board already solved.
Try the queens solver
Pick the board size, choose a colour, and tap cells to paint each region exactly as it appears in today's game. When every cell is painted with 8 regions, solve.
How the solver reads a board
Queens has three rules and the solver enforces all three at once: exactly one crown in every row, exactly one in every column, and exactly one in every colour region, with no two crowns touching, including diagonally. The regions are the whole puzzle. Without colours, the row, column and no-touching rules alone allow 47,622 different arrangements on a 9×9 board (OEIS A002464); the colour regions are what shrink that to one. That is why the tool asks you to paint rather than to type coordinates — the shapes of the regions are the input, and they have to be right to the cell.
Internally it is a plain backtracking search. It works down the board one row at a time, tries each column in turn, and accepts a cell only if its column and its colour region are still free and it does not touch the crown in the row above. When a row has no legal cell, it steps back to the previous row and tries the next column there. It stops at the first arrangement that fills every row, so it shows one answer and does not go on to check whether a second exists. On LinkedIn's boards that is not a limitation — all 36 boards in our archive (3 September – 10 October 2026) have exactly one solution — but a mis-painted board can have several, and the solver will show only one of them.
Nothing about the board leaves your browser. The solver is a small piece of client-side code; the painted grid is never uploaded, there is no account, and the Clear button (or changing the board size) wipes it completely.
Painting accurately: the mistakes that produce a wrong answer
Nearly every "the solver is wrong" report turns out to be a painting error, and they cluster in a few predictable places. Before you press solve, run down this list.
- Board size. In our archive LinkedIn's boards ran from 7×7 to 9×9 and the size changed from day to day. Count the columns on the real board before you pick a size; a 9×9 painted as 8×8 silently drops a whole row and column.
- Region count. A valid board has exactly as many colour regions as rows. The tool offers one colour per row and shows how many regions and cells you have painted; Solve stays disabled until every cell is painted and the region count matches the size.
- Cells on region borders. The game draws thin lines between cells of the same colour and thick lines between regions; when two regions are similar shades it is easy to put a border cell on the wrong side. Zoom in on the real board.
- Enclaves. None of the 36 boards in our archive had a region split into separate pieces, so if your painting shows one, check it against the real board. The solver itself accepts a split region if the board really has one.
- Unpainted cells. The Solve button stays disabled while any cell is blank. That is deliberate: a blank cell is not "no region", it is a missing constraint.
Reading the result
The solved board shows a crown in every row and one in every region. Compare it with your own attempt before you copy it into the game: the interesting information is usually the first crown you placed that differs from the solver's, because that is where your reasoning went wrong. One pattern to check for is a crown placed early in a large region because "it has to go somewhere", when the correct move was to leave the large region alone and let small regions force the answer.
The solver shows the first arrangement it finds and does not check for a second, so a mis-painted board can still produce crowns that the game rejects; if that happens, re-check the region borders. If it reports no solution, look first at border cells between similar shades, then at the board size.
Board sizes and what they mean for the search
The size of the board changes how much the rules bite. The table shows, for each size from 7×7 up, how many crowns are placed, how many arrangements the row-and-column rules alone would allow, and how many of those also keep every crown from touching — before the colours cut them down, which is why colours, not columns, decide the puzzle.
| Board | Crowns | Row-and-column arrangements | Of those, no two crowns touching |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7×7 | 7 | 5,040 | 646 |
| 8×8 | 8 | 40,320 | 5,242 |
| 9×9 | 9 | 362,880 | 47,622 |
| 10×10 | 10 | 3,628,800 | 479,306 |
| 11×11 | 11 | 39,916,800 | 5,296,790 |
Using the solver to get faster, not just unstuck
The tool is most valuable on the boards you did finish. After a slow solve, paint the board, solve it, and then work out by hand the order in which the crowns become forced: the smallest region first, then whichever region became smallest after that crown's eliminations. The solver lists its crowns in row order (R1, R2, …), not in forced order, so the forced order is yours to reconstruct — and that reconstruction is the exercise.
Two habits transfer directly from the solver to the real board. First, treat any region confined to a single row or column as already solved for that line — no other region may put a crown there. Second, when two regions between them occupy only two rows, those two rows belong to those two regions and every other region's cells in those rows are dead. Both are described in full on the Queens guide, and the archive of past Queens answers is a supply of boards to practise them on.
A real board, in the solver's order: Queens #856
Queens #856, the puzzle for 3 September 2026, was a 9×9 and a clean illustration of why region shape matters more than board position. Its solution put crowns at row 1 column 1, row 2 column 9, row 3 column 2, row 4 column 8, row 5 column 3, row 6 column 5, row 7 column 7, row 8 column 4 and row 9 column 6. The way in was not the top row. Down the left side, three three-cell regions sat in a staircase: one in column 1 (rows 1–3), one in column 2 (rows 2–4) and one in column 3 (rows 3–5). Each is confined to its column, so each column's crown is in that region.
Because those columns are neighbours, their crowns may not touch. If the column-2 crown were in row 2, every cell of the column-1 region would share its row or touch it; in row 4, the same happens to the column-3 region. Only row 3 works for column 2, which forces column 1 into row 1 and column 3 into row 5. Three crowns — R1C1, R3C2, R5C3 — from one look at the staircase. Two more single-column regions, in column 6 (rows 7–9) and column 7 (rows 6–8), pair up the same way and leave only three combinations, which the rest of the board's eliminations narrow to one. From there the board fell region by region, each crown placed because it was the only cell left in some region.
If #856 took you a long time by hand, check whether you spotted the staircase. The board's largest region covered 34 of its 81 cells, and starting there gives you dozens of candidates and no information. Paint the board into the solver to check your crowns, then retrace the staircase yourself — that is the habit worth copying.
What the solver does and does not accept
The tool implements the LinkedIn rule set exactly and nothing else. Any board with one crown per row, column and region and the no-touching rule will solve, whatever its source. Variants with two crowns per row, column and region are a different constraint and are not supported; neither are boards whose region count differs from the size — the Solve button stays disabled until the counter shows exactly as many regions as rows.
Sizes from 5×5 to 11×11 are accepted. LinkedIn's boards in our archive (3 September – 10 October 2026) ran from 7×7 to 9×9, with Saturday and Sunday boards 9×9 every time, so the tool has headroom on both sides. Region shapes may be any set of cells, connected or not; none of the 36 archived boards had a region in two pieces, but the solver handles one if it appears. A one-cell region is the easiest case of all, since its crown has exactly one place to go — 9 of the 36 archived boards had one.
What it will not do is read a screenshot. Painting is deliberate. Automatic recognition of a board with up to nine similar pastel colours could easily misread a cell, and a solver that silently returns the wrong crowns is worse than no solver at all. The minute spent painting is also the minute in which most people spot the deduction they missed, which is the outcome the tool is really for.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Queens solver work for boards other than LinkedIn's?
Yes. Any board that follows the same rules — one crown per row, column and region, no two crowns touching — will solve, at any size from 5×5 to 11×11.
Why does it say the board has no solution?
Every LinkedIn board we have checked has a solution — all 36 in our archive have exactly one — so "no solution" means the painted board differs from the real one. The usual culprits are the wrong board size and a region border cell painted the wrong colour.
Can I enter the crowns I have already placed?
Not in the current version — the solver works from the regions alone and finds the complete answer. Comparing its crowns with yours is the intended use.
Is using a solver cheating?
It is your streak. The site's position is that the solver is a teaching tool: paint, solve, then work out which deduction you missed. If you only ever copy the crowns, the guide will do more for your times than the tool will.