How to play Crowns
Crowns is a logic puzzle: a grid split into coloured regions where you place one crown per row, per column and per region. It is the same puzzle you may know as Star Battle (with one star per region) or as Queens, the version LinkedIn made popular. No arithmetic, no guessing: every board here has exactly one solution and can be reached by pure deduction.
The three rules
- One crown in every row — no more, no less.
- One crown in every column, and one in every colour region.
- No two crowns may touch, not even diagonally. A crown blocks the eight squares around it.
An 8×8 board has eight colour regions and eight crowns. Regions come in odd shapes: some are two squares, others fifteen.
How to start solving
Three techniques take you a long way:
- Small regions first. A region of two squares only has two candidates, and often one of them is already ruled out.
- A row inside one region. If a colour occupies every free square of a row, that row's crown belongs to it — so the rest of that region, elsewhere on the board, is out.
- Mark what you discard. Click twice to place a ✕. The eliminations are what solve the puzzle; the crowns are just the consequence.
In Crowns you can turn on automatic ✕ marks: place a crown and everything it rules out gets crossed for you.
Crowns, Queens and Star Battle: the same idea
The family is older than it looks. Star Battle comes from the puzzle magazines and usually asks for one, two or three stars per region. The one-star variant on a grid of coloured regions is exactly this game.
Queens is the name LinkedIn gave its daily version, borrowed from the eight queens chess problem: eight queens that cannot attack each other. The difference is that here the diagonal only blocks the adjacent square, not the whole line, and the colour regions replace the extra constraint.
What this version adds
- A new puzzle every day, the same board for everyone, with its own ranking.
- Boards from 5×5 to 10×10 in free play, generated on the spot.
- Guaranteed single solution. The generator refines the regions until the solver finds exactly one, so you never have to guess.
- Private leagues with a six-character code, and a live duel where you watch each other's progress on the same board.
- Free, no ads, and playable without an account.