7×7 Queens puzzles — unlimited practice

A fresh 7×7 board whenever you want one, at any difficulty, with 743 finished 7×7 boards behind this page. It is the middle of the daily band: big enough to need marking, small enough to finish in a sitting. Place 7 queens: one in every row, one in every column, one in every colour, and no two touching — corners included. Change the difficulty with the pill beside the board, switch size from the Unlimited tab, and keep going: no daily limit, no streak to protect, no clock you have to beat.

What a 7×7 Queens board asks of you

Seven colours over forty-nine squares, and the first size where crossing off stops being optional. The board is just past the point where you can keep every ruled-out square in your head, which means the deduction you need is often already on the grid and simply invisible until the dead cells are marked.

Which technique opens the board is what the difficulty pill beside it really changes. The strategy guide works through each named technique in the order the solver reaches for them, and the hint button on this board names the same ones.

Difficulty at 7×7 is a claim about the reasoning

The label never describes the square count — every board on this page has the same 49 squares. It describes what a board demands before it gives up its first queen, and the two move independently: a 7×7 rated beginner can be a shorter read than a 5×5 rated hard, 24 extra squares and all. The Queens Unlimited hub makes the same case with two real boards side by side.

• Beginner — 150 boards. One region already holds a single square, so the first queen is free and the rest falls to counting rows, columns and colours. That one gift is deliberate: from an empty grid the simplest techniques have nothing to bite on without it.
• Easy — 250 boards. Opens on a colour confined to one row or column. It owns that line, everything else in the line is dead, and the 7×7 comes apart from there.
• Medium — 250 boards. Several of those confinements chained together, each one visible only after the last has been marked off — which across 49 squares means marking is part of the technique, not tidying up after it.
• Hard — 93 boards. Pigeonhole arguments spanning several of the 7 regions at once, plus the exclusion reasoning that rules a square out by showing what it would break.

Easy if you are new to the size, then medium — the pair the Daily Max itself uses, in that order.

Practising at 7×7

Mark first, look second. If a 7×7 feels stuck, the usual cause is not a missing technique but a board you have been reading from memory instead of from the crosses.

Two things hold at every size. A hint never guesses: it finds the next move a person could justify, names the technique, and waits for you to press show me before it marks anything. And boredom means move up a difficulty, not a size — the same reasoning with more squares around it is not new practice. The hub page has the full method.

Every 7×7 board here is provably fair

Each one was checked twice: once for having exactly one solution, and once for being reachable from an empty grid without a single guess. The check reruns over the whole pool before every release, so it covers all 743 7×7 boards rather than the handful anybody happened to play. If you are stuck here, there is a next step and the hint can name it.

Where 7×7 sits

The Mini plays a 7×7 at level two and the Daily Max plays two of them, at easy and at medium.

• Daily Mini — three boards a day, 6×6 to 8×8. The one that carries a streak.
• Daily Max — ten boards a day, climbing to 10×10 and finishing harder than the Mini ever gets.
• Archive — every past day, still playable and still scored the same way.
• 6×6 practice — one step down, if 7×7 is currently more search than reasoning.
• 8×8 practice — one step up, once 7×7 at hard has stopped surprising you.

Every Queens board size

• 5×5
• 6×6
• 7×7
• 8×8
• 9×9
• 10×10
• 11×11
• 12×12