Eight Queens Puzzle

No. of Players

One

Equipment

An 8x8 checkerboard and eight counters are required for play. Using eight chess queen pieces may offer a sense of relief to the compulsive, but any eight counters, all alike or all different, will suffice.

History

Chess composer Max Bezzel published the eight queens puzzle in 1848. Franz Nauck published the first solutions in 1850.

Objective

The objective is simple. Place all eight queens on the board (they would potentially have the move of the standard queen in Orthochess) so that no two queens threaten each other. That is, no two queens share the same column, row, or diagonal.

Play

Simply place the queens on the board. There is no method to play.

Strategy

Click here to see some solved Eight Queens Puzzles.

Variations

The eight queens puzzle is an example of the more general n queens problem of placing n non-attacking queens on an n×n chessboard, for which solutions exist for all natural numbers n with the exception of n=2 and n=3.

Sources