Inside every book
Each PDF opens with a cover and the four rules — one queen in every row, one in every column, one in every color region, and no two queens touching, not even at a corner — so a book can be handed straight to someone who has never played. Then come the boards, four to a page, printed in the same colors as the boards on the site, with a heavy outline around every region so the puzzle survives a black-and-white printer. The Easy, Medium and Hard books hold twenty boards each; the Mixed book holds eighteen, six of each tier, climbing as you turn the pages.
Every board is a released daily puzzle, checked by our solver to have exactly one solution reachable by logic alone — nothing in a book needs a guess. Each has a play page online, and every book's page lists its boards by number, so checking an answer or reading the step-by-step solution for the one that beat you is a click away.
Solving Queens on paper
On the screen the board crosses off a placed queen's row, column and neighbors for you. On paper that is your job, and it is most of the game. A few habits that make a whole book go smoothly:
- Clear the cross before anything else. The instant you place a queen, dot every other cell in her row, every other cell in her column, and the four diagonal corners around her. One queen, sixteen dots or more. Never skip it.
- Find the smallest patch of color first. A region of two or three cells sitting in one row claims that row's queen, and the rest of the row can be dotted before you've placed anything. It is the opening move on nearly every board.
- Then look for two regions in two rows. If two colors live entirely inside the same pair of rows, they own those rows' queens, and everything else in the rows is out. The medium books are built around this move.
- Dots for no, a small circle for a queen. Keep the marks light; a nine-by-nine has eighty-one cells and seventy-two of them end up crossed off.
- Pencil, always. One misplaced queen invalidates a row, a column and a region at once, and you will want to take it back cleanly.
Which book is yours
For a child or a first-timer: Easy. Queens is the friendlier of our two printable games — the rules fit in one sentence and a small board falls to the smallest-region move alone — which makes the Easy book the best first puzzle book on the site. For the LinkedIn regular who wants more than one a day: Medium, twenty boards of the same feel. For a long train: Hard, where the small regions hide and the counting has to be exact. Not sure: Mixed — six of each, easy to hard, and you'll know your tier by page three.
Prefer the screen? Play Queens online free — three new boards every day, none of them expiring, and the solving guide walks through the three moves above with pictures. Ready for the deeper game? The Star Battle books are the same idea with two stars per line, and every Queens technique carries across.