Star Battle is a pure logic puzzle that takes seconds to learn, but can become surprisingly tricky as the difficulty level increases.
The puzzle is played on a square grid which is divided into various regions, delimited by bold lines.
Here is an example of a Star Battle grid:
The objective of the puzzle is to place stars into the cells following these two simple rules:
Here’s what the earlier example grid looks like once it’s been solved:
Solving Star Battle puzzles is all about eliminating possible placements. Here are some tips to help you get started, and then we’ll look at a worked example.
Let’s go through a Star Battle puzzle from beginning to end to demonstrate common techniques used. There’s rarely a unique path from start to finish, so this is not a definitive way to reach a solution, just one possible way.
This is the puzzle we are going to solve. These puzzles can look a little daunting at first, because the playing grid is almost entirely blank. But don’t worry, this is a fairly easy puzzle (Level 3 out of 7 in Puzzle Weekly).
We’ll begin by highlighting any regions that are constrained to a single row or column. Any stars placed in these will eliminate the rest of that row or column. There are three such regions in this puzzle.
Starting from each, we can cross out the rest of the row or column because we know they cannot possibly contain any stars. That gives us our first position – the region in the bottom left has been half obliterated by the one in the bottom right, leaving only one place left to put a star.
After drawing in the star, we can cross out the rest of the row because we know nothing can go in there. We can also cross out the cell diagonally up and to the right. It can be handy to put tick marks outside the grid to mark off the row and column as being ‘complete’, because they have their star.
Crossing out that row gave us another region with a single cell remaining, over on the right.
We draw in the star, bar out the rest of the row and column, and the two diagonally adjacent cells that haven’t been barred already. We can tick off another row and column as complete.
Now the region in the bottom right-hand corner has a single free cell, just begging for a star.
This is what the board looks like after putting in that star and crossing out the rest of the column. We don’t have any single free cells remaining, so are we stuck? Not at all…
Consider the cell highlighted in orange. It’s one of a pair of free cells remaining in this large region. If we were to put a star in there, it would prevent us from putting one into either of the green highlighted cells. As those are the only two available in that region, we cannot possibly put anything into the orange cell. So that gives us the position of our next star…
…which then allows us to fill in the star for the region in the top left.
It’s a quick race to the end now. There’s a single available cell in the region at the top, and filling that in will let us also fill in the last remaining orange region…
…which completes the puzzle. Every row, column, and region has a star, and none of them are touching, not even diagonally.
Ready to play some Star Battle yourself? Read on!
We’ve put together a taster of four puzzles for you to try out, including the example above. You can download and print the PDF below. Solutions are included, but no cheating!
Download Our Star Battle Taster
Want more Star Battle than just the taster? We have you covered. We sometimes include them in our free Puzzle Weekly magazine – you should totally sign up for that if you haven’t already, as it puts 28 brand new puzzles in your inbox every week.
You can also find four levels of Star Battle puzzles in our Jumbo Adult Puzzle Book – which happens to include more than 500 puzzles of 20 different varieties.