Casual Level Queens

Casual is where the region shapes start doing the work. On a 7×7 board there is enough space to build long, awkward regions that stretch across most of the grid, and those are what make a puzzle interesting — a region spanning five rows tells you very little on its own, but combined with two placed queens it can collapse to a single option.

The technique worth practising here is looking at regions in pairs. If two regions between them can only occupy two rows, no other region may use those rows, and large parts of the board resolve at once.

Puzzles run four to six minutes. This is the tier most players settle into for a while, and it is a good place to build speed before the boards get genuinely large.