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