Star Battle solver & hint engine (1★)

The classic pencil puzzle behind the whole current wave of cat and queen games. One star per row, column, and bold region; no two stars adjacent, not even diagonally.

What it does

Rebuild your board with the paint tool (or import a screenshot of an app version), then ask for hints. The engine climbs the same ladder a strong human solver uses — shadow crosses, forced placements, confinement and locked sets, region squeezes, and finally contradiction chains — and shows you the lowest rung that cracks your position, with the reasoning drawn on the grid.

One honest limitation

MeowSolver handles the 1★ variant only — one star per row, column, and region. Two-star puzzles (2★, common in puzzle magazines and apps like Star Battle by Andrea Sabbatini) use different counting and are not supported.

The 1★ rules are exactly the rules of Meowdoku and LinkedIn Queens, so everything on this site — solver, hints, and the strategy guide — applies to your puzzle directly; the stars are just drawn as cats.

Board sizes

6×6 through 12×12, covering standard published 1★ sets (8×8 and 10×10 are the common ones).

One solver, whole family: Meowdoku · LinkedIn Queens · Queenzle · Bunnydoku · Star Battle