What Two Not Touch is
Two Not Touch is the New York Times' daily star-placement puzzle: place two stars in every row, every column, and every outlined region of a 10×10 grid, with no two stars touching — not even diagonally. The name is the NYT's brand for what the puzzle world has long called Star Battle; the boards themselves are hand-crafted by Krazydad (Jim Bumgardner) and appear in the print edition and online.
The 'two' in the name is the star count, and the 'not touch' is the adjacency rule — and that second part is where new players stumble. A star does not block its whole diagonal the way a chess queen would. It blocks exactly the eight cells around it. Two stars on the same diagonal, two cells apart, are perfectly legal.
Playing the format here
Our daily puzzle is the same canonical format: a 10×10 grid, two stars per row, column, and region, one unique solution reachable by logic alone. If you finish the NYT's boards and want more, the archive holds every past daily, and the puzzle library adds 1-star boards for warming up and 14×14 three-star boards for long solves.
Stuck on a board — ours or anyone's? The technique ladder is the same everywhere: start with trivial marks around placed stars, then look for regions confined to a single row or column, then count stars across bands of rows. The strategy guide walks through each rung with the vocabulary you'll see in solving communities.
Hints for Two Not Touch solvers
Three habits solve most 10×10 two-star boards. First: mark X's relentlessly — every star you place should immediately produce a ring of X's around it, and every completed row, column, or region should be swept clean. Second: hunt for cramped regions — a region whose remaining cells all sit in one row or column claims that line's stars and empties the rest of it. Third: count in bands — pick two or three adjacent rows, total the stars they must hold, and compare against the regions that live entirely inside them. When the numbers match, everything else in the band is an X.
And remember the two-star wrinkle: the two stars sharing a row, column, or region must themselves keep their distance — a row's pair can never sit in adjacent cells.
Looking for the original? Play the official version here.