Star Battle (PuzzleMadness)

About Star Battle (PuzzleMadness)

Star Battle is a placement puzzle on a grid divided into regions. Every row, every column and every region holds the same number of stars: one on the smaller grids, two on the bigger ones. No two stars may touch, not even at a corner. It is the same family as LinkedIn's Queens, which uses one per line and region.

The daily page opens today's puzzle on its own, and its title carries the date (on 3 October 2026 it read "Daily Medium Star Battle Puzzle for Saturday 3rd October 2026 (Medium)"). There is a separate dated puzzle for each difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard and Mixed. Past days stay in the archive, so a missed puzzle can be played later, and there is a print version and an image download of the grid. PuzzleMadness does not publish solutions: the site tells you when you have finished a grid correctly or made a mistake. Each completed puzzle adds to your total on the Star Battle monthly and all-time leaderboards, where only your best score on any one puzzle counts.

The rules page starts with regions that are only one row tall: their star must be in that row, so the rest of the row is empty. Small regions and regions squeezed into two rows work the same way. Every star also clears its eight neighbours, which quickly shrinks the other regions.

PuzzleMadness is a British puzzle site with dozens of daily puzzle types in the browser, from many sudoku variants to logic grids such as Nurikabe, Hashi and Slitherlink. It is free to play and carries ads. A free account keeps track of the puzzles you have finished and puts your name on the leaderboards, and the badges next to usernames mark how many puzzles a player has completed.

How to play Star Battle (PuzzleMadness)

1. Open the day's Star Battle page and choose Easy, Medium, Hard or Mixed.
2. Find regions confined to one row or column and clear the rest of that line.
3. Place stars, marking every square around a star as empty.
4. Give every row, column and region its quota of stars; the site marks the puzzle solved.

Tips

• If a group of regions fills exactly that many rows, no other region can have a star in those rows.
• Mark squares that would leave a region with no room as empty.
• On two-star grids, count carefully: two stars in a row cannot be next to each other.

Questions