Star Battle Puzzle

How to Play Star Battle

Star Battle is a clean, spatial logic puzzle with just two rules. Every row, every column and every shaded region must contain exactly 2 stars (or 3 stars on Hard grids). And no two stars may touch — not even diagonally. That's the whole game: fill the board correctly and you win.

Every GridPaw Star Battle puzzle has exactly one solution, reachable through logic alone — no guessing required. Tap a cell to place a star (it renders as a little paw print) and tap it again to remove it. On a computer you can click and drag across the board to mark several cells in one sweep, or use the arrow keys with Enter/Space to toggle. Any cell that breaks the no-touch or count rules glows red, so you always know where to look. Stuck? The Hint button reveals the true value of the selected cell — star or empty — and you get 3 hints per puzzle. On phones and tablets everything works with simple taps, and the grid scales to your screen.

What Is Two Not Touch? Star Battle vs Two Not Touch

Star Battle and Two Not Touch are the exact same puzzle under two names. "Two Not Touch" is the classic American title used in puzzle books and magazines — it spells out the heart of the rules in three words: two stars may not touch. "Star Battle" is the modern name popularized by mobile apps and online puzzle sites, and it's what most players search for today.

Same grid, same shaded regions, same rules: exactly N stars in every row, column and region, with no two stars touching, even diagonally. The only real difference is branding — if you've solved one, you've solved the other, which is why the same layout sometimes appears as "Two Not Touch" in a print magazine and "Star Battle" in an app. Here at GridPaw we call the game Star Battle because that's the name players know, and the footer of this page always credits the Two Not Touch name so nobody walks away confused. (Our resident cats, for the record, prefer the star version — paws are better at pointing at screens than at flipping tiny book pages.)

Star Battle vs Sudoku

Sudoku and Star Battle share the same backbone: organise symbols across rows and columns so the board obeys a set of placement rules. Sudoku places the digits 1–9 so nothing repeats in any row, column or 3×3 box. Star Battle replaces the digits with identical stars, replaces the fixed 3×3 boxes with oddly shaped regions, and swaps the no-repeat rule for an exact-count rule — exactly 2 stars per line (3 on Hard) — plus the no-touch ban, which extends to diagonal neighbours.

That one change transforms the feel of the game. Because stars are interchangeable, you can't lean on digit patterns — every deduction is about geometry: where a region is shaped, how many cells a star's neighbourhood eats, which lines are already full. Sudoku is arithmetic-adjacent pattern logic; Star Battle is closer to a packing problem, and it's a wonderful warm-up for visual reasoning. Neither game is inherently harder — a small 8×8 Star Battle is friendlier to a beginner than most Sudoku grids, while a 14×14 with three stars per line demands the same sustained focus as an expert Sudoku.

Star Battle Tips and Strategy

New to Star Battle? These habits will carry you through most grids — including the 14×14 Hard ones:

1. Start with the smallest regions. A region with five cells needs 2 stars, and those stars must not touch each other: that combination usually has only a handful of legal layouts. Lock them in and the neighbouring regions get squeezed.
2. Every star deletes 8 neighbours. The moment you place a star, mentally cross out its whole 3×3 neighbourhood — none of those cells can ever hold another star. Regions that look big shrink fast once their first star lands.
3. Count rows and columns as they fill. When a row has its 2 stars, every remaining cell in that row is guaranteed empty; same for columns and regions. Treat them as blank until the end rather than hoping for a second star there.
4. Exploit edges and corners. A star on the border touches fewer cells than a star in the middle, so boundary cells are the easiest to place and the most informative when they're forced.
5. Read region floors. If a region still needs 2 stars but only 3 candidate cells survive, the remaining choices are tiny — test them against the rows and columns. When candidates collapse to the exact number needed, the region is solved.
6. Spend hints on the last stubborn region. With 3 hints per puzzle you can afford to reveal one or two cells on the hard tail — a single revealed star or empty often unlocks the whole board.