Strategy guides · Star Battle online
How to solve Star Battle puzzles: rules and strategies
Star Battle is a pure logic puzzle: you never need to guess. In the one-star version you play as Queens on Fiplay, every row, every column and every color region holds exactly one queen, and no two queens may touch, not even at a corner. These are the techniques that solve almost every board.
The rules in one breath
Place exactly one queen in every row, every column and every color region. Queens can't sit in neighboring cells, including diagonal neighbors. Mark cells that can't hold a queen with an ×, so the board slowly fills with certainty.
1. Start with the smallest region
A region of one cell is a free queen. A region of two or three cells in a line already tells you a lot: whichever cell holds the queen, the cells next to all of them are off limits. Mark the cells that every option rules out.
2. Every queen clears its row, column and ring
As soon as you place a queen, cross out the rest of its row, its column and the eight cells around it. Then look again: a region that just lost most of its cells often has a single spot left.
3. Regions locked into one line
If every free cell of a region lies in one row, that region's queen is in that row, so no other region can use it. Cross out the rest of the row. The same works for columns, and for two regions that together fit inside two rows: those two rows belong to them, and everything else in them is empty.
4. Count the lines
On an N×N board there are N queens. If three regions sit entirely within three columns, they use up those columns, and any other region must place its queen elsewhere. This counting trick is how the hardest boards fall.
Common mistakes
- Forgetting the diagonal neighbors when crossing out around a queen.
- Placing a queen because it looks likely. If you can't prove it, mark × elsewhere first.
- Ignoring the biggest region: late in the game it is often the one with a single cell left.