What Star Battle is
Star Battle is a pencil-and-paper logic puzzle played on a square grid divided into bold outlined regions. Your job is to place stars so that every row, every column, and every region contains exactly the same required number of stars — one star on beginner boards, two on the classic 10×10 format, three on expert 14×14 grids. One extra constraint completes the game: no two stars may ever touch, not even diagonally.
That no-touch rule is what gives the puzzle its shape. Every star you place instantly sweeps its eight neighboring cells clean, so each placement is both progress and information. Good solvers alternate between placing stars and marking eliminated cells with X's until the board resolves — and a well-made board resolves completely by logic, with no guessing anywhere.
A short history
Star Battle came out of the World Puzzle Championship scene and spread through puzzle magazines under several names — German publications print it as Doppelstern, and the New York Times publishes hand-crafted 10×10 two-star boards as Two Not Touch. More recently, LinkedIn's Queens game introduced millions of players to the one-star variant without them realizing they were playing Star Battle.
The puzzle's endurance comes from how little it asks and how much it gives: two rules you can explain in a sentence, and a technique ladder deep enough that championship solvers still argue about the hard end of it.
Playing Star Battle here
This site publishes a fresh 10×10 two-star daily puzzle — the canonical format — plus an unlimited library across four sizes and three difficulty tiers. Every board is generated and machine-verified to have exactly one solution reachable by pure deduction, and the interface does the bookkeeping for you: tap to mark, tap again to star, and let the optional auto-X assist mark the cells each star rules out.
Start with the daily above, learn the technique ladder in the strategy guide, or browse all puzzle sizes.