Star Battle is a logic puzzle where you place stars on a grid so that every row, every column, and every coloured region holds exactly one star, and no two stars ever touch, not even on the diagonal. That's the whole game. No words, no trivia, no maths. Just a grid, a handful of rules, and the quiet satisfaction of watching the board fall into place.

If the rules sound familiar, you've probably met this puzzle under another name. LinkedIn calls its version Queens. Other puzzle makers call it Stars, or Two Not Touch. Same family, same logic. We've built our own take, and it's live now in CleverGoat Labs, the corner of CleverGoat where we test new games before they graduate to the main lineup.

The rules, in full

A Star Battle board is a square grid split into coloured regions. Your job is to place stars so that:

• Each row has exactly one star.
• Each column has exactly one star.
• Each coloured region has exactly one star.
• No two stars are adjacent, including diagonally.

Most boards ask for one star per row, column, and region. Harder variants bump that up to two stars each, which is where Star Battle stops being a warm-up and starts being a proper fight. Our Labs version starts you gentle and scales from there.

How to actually solve one

Start with the small regions. A region squeezed into three or four cells has very few places a star can legally go, so it's the fastest place to make a confident move. Lock it in, then mark every cell it rules out: the rest of its row, its column, and all eight neighbours.

From there, hunt for forced moves. If a region only stretches across a single row, that row's star has to sit inside it, which clears every other cell in the row in one stroke. Lines that get crowded by earlier stars often collapse to a single option. The trick is to keep marking dead cells as you go, because an empty grid hides the answer and a well-marked one hands it to you.

When you're properly stuck, count. Pick a row or region with only two candidates left and test what each one forces. One of them usually breaks a rule within a move or two, and the other is your star.

Why we built our own

I'll be honest about the bias here: this puzzle is a personal favourite, and that's partly why it landed in Labs. Star Battle is pure deduction. There's no luck and no guessing if you read the board properly, which makes the solve feel earned every single time. It also has the thing we care about most at CleverGoat, a clean five-minute loop you can share with a friend and argue about afterwards. "How did you not see the corner?" is, in our experience, the sign of a good puzzle.

Labs is where we find out whether you agree. Play a few, tell us what's too easy or too mean, and the feedback shapes what the game becomes.

Try it

The CleverGoat Star Battle beta is live in Labs. A fresh board every day, no account needed. If you already play Queens on LinkedIn, you'll feel at home in about ten seconds, and you'll have a second board to look forward to.