Star Battle

Star Battle is a logic puzzle on a gridded board split into irregular regions. You must place a fixed number of stars in every row, every column and every region, and no two stars may touch, not even diagonally. Each puzzle has exactly one solution.

• Every row, column and region needs the same star count (one or two, depending on the board).
• Stars are never adjacent, so a placed star rules out all eight surrounding cells.
• Mark cells you have eliminated with an X to keep your deductions straight; solve it when all stars are correctly placed.

• Desktop: click a cell to cycle empty → star → X note → empty. Right-click jumps straight to an X note (or clears one).
• Phone & tablet: tap a cell to cycle through star and note, no keyboard needed. Use the Hint and Reset buttons any time.

• Sizes, 6×6 with one star per line, 8×8 with one star, and a tougher 10×10 with two stars per line.
• Daily, one shared puzzle each day.
• Practice, endless fresh boards on demand.

• Hunt for small regions: a region that barely fits its stars sharply limits where they go.
• Use the no-touch rule aggressively, each placed star eliminates a whole ring of neighbours, often forcing the next move.
• When a row or column already has its full count, X out every remaining cell in that line.

Star Battle is often attributed to a named designer, but not in any source solid enough to cite here, so this section will not pretend to one. What can be said is where it sits.

It is a region-partition puzzle of the sort Nikoli made a house style — a grid cut into irregular shapes, where the shapes carry as much of the constraint as the rows and columns do. Nurikabe is the best-known example of that design instinct.

Its own contribution is the combination of a quota with a spacing rule. Every row, every column and every region must hold the same fixed number of stars, and no two stars may touch even diagonally — so each placement both satisfies three counts at once and forbids the eight cells around it. Those two forces pulling against each other are the whole puzzle.

Further reading: The Nikoli Tradition

Star Battle is a pure-deduction grid puzzle in the tradition of region-based logic challenges, prized for needing no arithmetic, just careful elimination. This is an original, free browser version with daily and practice modes, playable instantly with no download or sign-up.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.

1. The Nikoli Tradition

   Star Battle belongs to a Japanese puzzle tradition that values pure reasoning over language, where a grid divided into regions and a star count per line define the entire challenge.