Hard Level Queens

Hard is the heart of the game. It has 90 puzzles — by far our largest pack — and it is where the daily puzzle is drawn from, so every player who solves the daily is solving a Hard board.

At 10×10 the grid is large enough that the whole thing no longer fits in working memory. Successful solvers stop trying to hold it all and instead work a corner at a time, resolving one dense cluster of regions before moving on. Marking blocked cells is no longer a convenience here; without it, positions become genuinely difficult to read.

Expect ten to thirteen minutes, longer when a board resists. If you can finish Hard puzzles reliably you are solving the same difficulty the daily challenge sets every day, and Expert becomes a matter of scale rather than new technique.