NYT Queens Solver —
paint the regions, get every crown.

Field guide

How the Queens Solver works.

Queens is a grid-logic puzzle popularized by the NYT Games app: the board is divided into colored regions, and your job is to place exactly one crown so that every row, every column, and every color region ends up with exactly one — with no two crowns touching, even diagonally. Unlike classic chess queens, a Queens crown doesn't attack along full diagonals; it only conflicts with the eight cells immediately touching it.

Recreating your puzzle

Paint each cell with its color exactly as shown in your puzzle (the grid size and region shapes vary daily), then hit Solve. The solver validates that every color forms a proper region before it starts searching, so a misread cell is caught immediately instead of producing a wrong answer.

The algorithm: constraint satisfaction with backtracking

The solver treats the puzzle as a constraint-satisfaction problem: each region is a variable that must be assigned exactly one cell (the crown's position), subject to three constraints — one crown per row, one per column, and no two crowns in touching cells. It searches region by region, in order of fewest legal cells remaining (the same “fail-first” idea used by our Sudoku Solver's MRV heuristic), and backtracks the instant a choice leaves another region with zero legal cells left.

This ordering matters: solving the most constrained region first prunes the search tree early, so even large, densely-packed boards typically solve in well under a millisecond.

Worked example

Suppose a 6×6 board has an orange region confined to just two cells in row 1. Placing orange's crown in either cell immediately rules out the rest of row 1 and both of that crown's columns for every other region — often forcing a second region into a single remaining cell. The solver chases this chain of forced placements first, and only falls back to trial-and-error backtracking once no region has just one legal cell left.

Reading the result

Once solved, every cell that holds a crown is marked with a ♛ icon layered on top of its region color. Use Copy solution to grab a plain-text list of row → column placements you can paste anywhere.

Tips for solving it yourself

• Start with the smallest region. A color confined to one row or a couple of cells constrains the whole board the fastest.
• Cross off touching cells immediately. Every placed crown eliminates its row, column, and all eight surrounding cells — mark them before considering your next region.
• Watch for regions squeezed into one line. If a color's remaining legal cells all sit in a single row or column, every other region can safely rule out that entire row or column.

Disclaimer: This tool is an independent fan creation and is not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by The New York Times Company. “Queens” is a trademark of its respective owner. Provided for practice and entertainment only.