Shrooms

Shrooms dresses up the star battle puzzle, in the two-star form some solvers know as Two Not Touch. The forest grid is divided into coloured regions, or dirt patches, and the solution has exactly two mushrooms in every row, every column and every region. No two mushrooms may touch, including at the corners, and every board has one solution reached by logic alone.

Each day opens on a choice of three boards: Easy on an 8x8 grid, Medium on 10x10 and Hard on 12x12. Tap a cell to cycle it through empty, grass and mushroom. Grass is your own marker for squares where nothing can grow; it is optional and never scored. A safe mushroom shows a blue cap, and one that breaks a rule turns red. Check tells you how many mushrooms sit where they cannot belong without saying which, a hint highlights and explains one deduction, and a Candidate mode lets you pencil in options on the larger grids.

Shrooms is one of the daily games on Greatest Games, a site of word, logic and number puzzles. New boards go up every day at midnight US Eastern, the same for everyone, and they play free in the browser with no account or download. Solves earn points for the site's leaderboard, with bonuses for harder boards, speed, streaks and solving without hints. The archive lists every past puzzle: a free account plays the last 7 days, and the paid Greatest Games Plus plays them all and removes the ads the site shows to other visitors.

It suits players of Queens and other region puzzles who want a step up to two tokens per line, with a soft look and a gentle Easy board to start.