Star Battle solver & hint engine (1★ & 2★)

The classic pencil puzzle behind the whole current wave of cat and queen games. One star — or two, in the 2★ variant — per row, column, and bold region; no two stars adjacent, not even diagonally.

🔒 Local only — screenshots are read on your device and never leave your browser.

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, row and column squeezes, region squeezes, and finally contradiction chains — and shows you the lowest rung that cracks your position, with the reasoning drawn on the grid.

2★ boards are supported

Two-star puzzles (2★ — two stars per row, column, and region, the variant common in puzzle magazines and apps) are fully supported: tap the ×2 button beside the size selector, or just import a screenshot — two stars already sharing a row or column flips the mode automatically. The hint engine switches to genuine 2★ techniques: the pair squeeze, stretch counting, and band counting, all covered in the double-cat strategy guide. Other counting schemes (3★+) 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 · PandaClue · Duckdoku · Star Battle