Star Battle Puzzle — Play the One-Star Variant Free
The board above is a Star Battle puzzle in its simplest form: one star per row, column and region. Here the stars are drawn as crowns, but the logic is exactly the one you know from puzzle magazines and championship booklets. Every grid is generated fresh, checked to have a single solution, and free to play without an account.
Star Battle rules in brief
A Star Battle grid is a square divided into irregular regions, with as many regions as there are rows. You place stars so that:
- every row holds the same fixed number of stars,
- every column holds that number too,
- every region holds that number as well, and
- no two stars sit in neighboring cells — not even diagonally.
That fixed number is what separates the variants. The classic magazine format is two stars on a 10×10 grid; larger books go up to three stars on 14×14 and beyond. With one star the grid can be much smaller, and that is the variant played on this site. It is the same format that reached a huge new audience in 2024 under the name Queens, which is why you will see crowns instead of stars here.
Where Star Battle comes from
Star Battle was created by the Dutch puzzle designer Hans Eendebak and first appeared at the World Puzzle Championship in 2003. It caught on quickly among competitive solvers because the rules take ten seconds to explain while the deductions run deep, and it has been a regular in championship rounds and puzzle magazines ever since. Unlike Sudoku there are no digits at all: everything you deduce comes from the shapes of the regions and the no-touch rule.
One star versus two: what changes
If you already solve the two-star Star Battle puzzle, the one-star version will feel familiar but quicker. A few things are worth knowing before your first board:
- Counting arguments get simpler. In two-star puzzles you often reason that "these three regions fit inside three rows, so they use all six stars of those rows". The same argument works here with one star per row, and it shows up constantly on 9×9 and 10×10 boards.
- The 2×2 rule is sharper. Any 2×2 block can hold at most one star in every variant. With only one star per region, a placed star also finishes its region, row and column in a single move, so each placement clears far more of the grid.
- Small regions are gifts. A one-cell region is a free star. A region of two or three cells in a line rules out every cell that touches all of its options.
- Solves are short. A 6×6 takes under a minute once you know the patterns; a hard 10×10 takes five to ten. That makes the one-star format good for practice in spare moments, where a two-star 14×14 needs a quiet half hour.
How each Star Battle puzzle here is made
Hand-set Star Battle puzzles are a craft, and this site does not pretend to replace them. What it offers instead is an endless supply: a generator places a legal set of stars, grows the regions around them, and then a solver counts the solutions. A board is only shown if the count is exactly one, so you never need to guess, and a contradiction always means an earlier mark was wrong. Pick 6×6, 8×8, 9×9 or 10×10 with the size menu under the board and press New puzzle as often as you like.
Notation, if you come from paper
On paper most solvers dot or cross the cells that cannot hold a star. Here a single tap puts an ✕ in a cell and a second tap places the crown; dragging with a mouse paints a run of ✕ marks. If you prefer to do the bookkeeping yourself, turn off Auto-✕ in the settings and the grid behaves like a sheet of paper. Turn off Show errors as well for a true competition-style solve.
Keep going
There is a shared daily board that is the same for every player, an archive of all earlier dailies, and unlimited mode when you just want the next grid. The strategy guide covers confinement, pair exclusion and counting with one-star examples, and the rules page explains the controls in full.