Star Battle
Star Battle was invented by Hans Eendebak (Netherlands) for the World Puzzle Championship 2003 in Arnhem, inspired by an earlier idea from Tim Peeters. It first appeared in WPC 2003 / Part I, where it immediately stood out for its elegant logic and clean constraints.
The puzzle’s roots trace back to Peeters’ 1999 creation “Cattle”, which featured divided regions and the rule that marked cells could not touch—not even diagonally. In Cattle, however, the number of marks (cattle) per row and column was explicitly given. Star Battle refined this concept by introducing the uniform placement rule: each row, column, and region must contain the same fixed number of stars, while stars must still not be adjacent.
This combination of geometric structure and positional constraints made Star Battle both intuitive and deeply logical. The format quickly became a modern classic and inspired a large family of variations, many of which expand on region shapes, star counts, or adjacency rules while retaining the elegant core of the original puzzle.
The puzzle’s roots trace back to Peeters’ 1999 creation “Cattle”, which featured divided regions and the rule that marked cells could not touch—not even diagonally. In Cattle, however, the number of marks (cattle) per row and column was explicitly given. Star Battle refined this concept by introducing the uniform placement rule: each row, column, and region must contain the same fixed number of stars, while stars must still not be adjacent.
This combination of geometric structure and positional constraints made Star Battle both intuitive and deeply logical. The format quickly became a modern classic and inspired a large family of variations, many of which expand on region shapes, star counts, or adjacency rules while retaining the elegant core of the original puzzle.
Rules
Fill some cells with stars so that two stars appear in every row, column, and bold-outlined area. Cells with stars cannot touch each other, not even diagonally.
Click to see the answer.