The same puzzle at heart
LinkedIn's Queens game gives you a colored grid and asks for one crown per row, per column, and per color region, with no two crowns touching — including diagonally. That is, move for move, a one-star Star Battle: rename the crowns to stars and the rule sheets are identical. Star Battle is the older, more general puzzle from the World Puzzle Championship tradition; Queens is its friendliest special case, dressed for a daily commute.
Everything you've internalized from Queens transfers directly: the ring of eliminations around every placement, the value of finishing a color region, the way a region squeezed into one row claims that row. Our 5×5 and 8×8 one-star boards are exactly Queens-shaped, with unlimited plays instead of one per day.
What changes with two stars
The classic Star Battle format — 10×10 with two stars per row, column, and region — is where the puzzle grows past Queens. A placed star no longer finishes its row; you must track how many are still owed everywhere. Pairs need spacing (a row's two stars can never touch), and whole new technique families appear: counting stars across bands of rows and comparing against the regions inside them.
The payoff is depth. Queens boards resolve in a few minutes of clean deduction; a hard two-star board can sustain twenty minutes of layered reasoning without ever requiring a guess. If Queens has started feeling automatic, that's the sign you're ready.
Moving between the two
For unlimited Queens-style play, our sister site Queens Game offers LinkedIn-style boards with the same colored-region presentation, plus ranked and timed modes. When you want the fuller puzzle, come back for the daily 10×10 Star Battle — the format the NYT publishes as Two Not Touch — and work up through the difficulty tiers.
A practical bridge: play our easy 10×10 boards with auto-X on. The assist handles the extra bookkeeping two-star boards demand, letting you focus on the new counting logic until it becomes second nature.