The N-Queens problem involves placing N queens on an N x N chessboard such that no queen can attack any other queen. Queens can attack horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. A backtracking algorithm is used to try all possible arrangements of queens until a valid solution is found where no two queens can attack each other. The algorithm starts by placing queens in the leftmost column, then recursively tries all rows while checking if each placement leads to a safe configuration without attacks.