Star Battle review: one star per row, column and region, and none of them touching
Star Battle, also known as Two Not Touch, is a placement puzzle with three rules and no numbers. Put one star in every row, every column and every coloured region, and never let two stars touch. The daily grid is small enough for a coffee break, and it still produces the little click of a forced move that keeps us coming back.
- Three rules, learned in a minute
- Every puzzle checked for one logical solution
- Three hints per puzzle if you stall
- Helpful settings: conflicts and auto-cross
- Only one-star puzzles, up to 8×8
- No statistics or streaks
- English, French and German only
What is Star Battle?
The grid is split into outlined, coloured regions. Your job is to place stars so that every row, every column and every region holds exactly one, and no two stars share an edge or a corner. A 6×6 puzzle therefore has six stars in total, one for each row, column and region.
Star Battle offers a free daily puzzle, the same 6×6 grid for every player, and an unlimited mode with three sizes. The puzzles are generated in the browser and each one is checked by a built-in solver before you see it: it must have a single solution that can be reached without guessing. The site is available in English, French and German.
How a puzzle plays
Tap a cell to place a star, tap again to mark it with a cross, and once more to clear it. Right-click on a computer, or a long press on a phone, puts a cross down straight away. Small stars beside the grid turn gold when a row or column has its star, which makes it easy to see what is left. You can also move between cells with the arrow keys and mark crosses with X.
Undo steps back one move, with Ctrl+Z as a shortcut, and Clear wipes the board without resetting the timer. The timer starts when the puzzle appears and pauses when the tab is in the background. If you get stuck, the Hint button places one correct star for you, three times per puzzle. When the last star is in the right place, the board lights up and the result screen shows your time, the number of stars and how many hints you used. Your board, time and remaining hints are saved, so you can come back to an unfinished puzzle.
Daily or Unlimited?
The daily puzzle is a 6×6 grid that changes at midnight in your local time. The share text gives the puzzle number, the grid size, your time and, if you used any, the number of hints, followed by a row of stars. On a phone it opens the share sheet; on a computer it copies to the clipboard.
Unlimited offers Easy 5×5, Medium 6×6 and Hard 8×8, with a new puzzle whenever you ask for one and an unfinished puzzle kept for each size. Settings add dark mode (it follows your device by default), a hidden timer, Show conflicts, which turns stars red when they touch or break a quota and is on by default, and Auto ✕, which crosses out the eight neighbours of every star you place. A counter shows how many players have solved a puzzle today, and you can rate the game out of five.
Difficulty and strategy
Most of the work in Star Battle is not placing stars but ruling cells out. Each star blocks the eight cells around it plus the rest of its row, column and region, and on a 6×6 grid that removes a large part of the board at once. The 5×5 puzzles are a good way to learn this; the 8×8 grids need longer chains of reasoning, especially where several regions share the same few columns.
What could be better
Experienced solvers will notice that every puzzle here is a one-star puzzle and the largest grid is 8×8. Classic competition Star Battle often uses bigger grids with two stars per row, column and region, and that variant is where the deepest logic lives. A two-star hard mode would give the site a much longer ceiling.
Like Nonograms, Star Battle keeps no statistics: you get a time and a share text for each puzzle, but no solve count, no best time and no streak. And with three languages it covers fewer players than the seven-language word games in the network.
Verdict
Star Battle is a tidy, well-made home for a puzzle that deserves to be better known. The rules take a minute, the generator guarantees a fair puzzle every time, and the settings let you choose how much help you want, from none at all to auto-crosses and three hints. It is a little small for experts, but as a daily logic warm-up it is excellent. If you enjoy it, the cat-themed Meowdoku builds on the same idea.
Star Battle FAQ
Yes. Every puzzle, size and setting on StarBattle.gg is free to play in the browser, with no account.
No. Two stars may never share an edge or a corner.
Three per puzzle. Each hint places one correct star on the board.
The daily puzzle is 6×6. Unlimited mode offers Easy 5×5, Medium 6×6 and Hard 8×8.