Star Battle by Thomas Snyder
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)
Theme: Star Face
Author/Opus: This is the 359th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard Star Battle rules. Two stars per row, column, and region.
Difficulty: 4 stars
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 5:30, Master = 9:30, Expert = 19:00
Solution: PDF; a solution video is also available here.
Note: Follow this link for other classic Star Battles. If you are new to this puzzle type, here are our easiest Star Battles to get started on. More Star Battle puzzles can be found in The Art of Puzzles, in the book Star Battle by JinHoo Ahn, and in our beginner-friendly collection Intro to GMPuzzles by Serkan Yürekli.
I must have got lucky on this one. Finished in 16 min and I wan’t able to finish the three previous puzzles this week.
Same here! This one felt a lot easier than 4 stars. The other ones this week I finished in between expert and master, but today I got 6 minutes with a completely logical solve.
I also felt like this puzzle was easier than the three previous puzzles. For Wednesday I’m pretty sure that my brain was just incapable of processing the strange shapes, but I thought both Thursday and Friday had more sophisticated counting deductions than today.
The original puzzle here had some slightly different arrangement of cells in R11/R12 and was more difficult — we likely misestimated the difficulty after simplifying the puzzle, and I agree this could be 3-3.5 stars.
Guess I was unlucky and I found this very difficult. I deduced about half the solution but to get the remainder I had to do lots of branching and playout until the end multiple times before finally one branch got it….!
I found it easier and could solve it under GM time. Looks like learning from other solution videos helped me to solve this puzzle quicker.