How to play Crowns
Crowns is a logic puzzle on a square board divided into coloured regions. Your job is to place crowns so that every row, every column and every coloured region holds exactly one — and no two crowns touch each other, not even diagonally at a corner.
It belongs to the same family as the old eight queens puzzle and the puzzle usually called Star Battle. Every board has exactly one answer, and it can always be found by reasoning rather than guessing.
The rules
- One crown in every row.
- One crown in every column.
- One crown in every coloured region. An 8 x 8 board has eight regions and needs eight crowns.
- No two crowns touch. The eight squares around a crown — including the four corners — must stay empty.
Controls
There is an option on the start screen to cross out squares automatically: place a crown and everything it rules out — its row, its column, its region and its eight neighbours — is crossed off for you.
- Tap once to cross a square out, a note to yourself that no crown can go there.
- Tap twice for a crown, and a third time to clear the square.
- Drag across the board to cross out a line of squares in one go.
- Undo takes back your last change, and Clear empties the board.
- Crowns that break a rule are striped in red straight away, so a mistake never goes unnoticed.
How to solve it
Nearly every Crowns board is solved by the same few ideas, applied again and again.
- Start with the smallest region. A region of two or three squares has very few places for its crown. Squares that every option would rule out can be crossed off at once.
- A region in one row owns that row. If a whole region lies in a single row, its crown is in that row — so every other square in the row can be crossed out. The same goes for columns.
- Count regions against rows. If two regions fit entirely inside the same two rows, those two rows are taken by them, and every other region's squares in those rows are ruled out.
- Look at what a crown would touch. If putting a crown on a square would leave some region with nowhere to go, that square is not a crown.
Board sizes and the daily
Free play offers 6 x 6, 8 x 8 and 10 x 10. The daily board is the same for everyone and grows through the week: 6 x 6 on Monday and Tuesday, 8 x 8 from Wednesday to Friday, and 10 x 10 at the weekend. Solving it keeps your streak going, and the result can be shared without giving the board away.
How the boards are made
Every board is built in your browser around a hidden answer. The crowns are placed first — one per row and column, none touching — and then a coloured region is grown outwards from each of them, a square at a time, until the board is covered.
Randomly grown regions usually allow more than one answer, so the board is then checked. Whenever a second answer exists, one of its crown squares is handed to a neighbouring region. The hidden answer survives that change and the rival one does not, and this repeats until only the hidden answer is left.
Common questions
- Can two crowns touch diagonally?
- No. Crowns may not touch at all, so the four diagonal neighbours of a crown are off limits as well as the squares beside it.
- Is there only one answer?
- Yes. Every board is checked before you see it, and adjusted until exactly one placement of the crowns works.
- What do the crosses do?
- Nothing, as far as the rules go. They are notes to yourself, for squares you have worked out cannot hold a crown.
- Is this the same as the queens puzzle?
- It is the same idea. Crowns follows the rules of the region queens puzzle, also known as Star Battle with one star per region.