Bonus: Star Battle (also known as Queens) by Thomas Snyder
Today we have two “500th puzzle” celebrations from Thomas Snyder, with a more challenging Math Path for our Season 4 subscribers posting soon.
Earlier this year, Thomas helped provide puzzles for the launch of the LinkedIn game Queens, a very accessible, one-star version of Star Battle puzzles. We will be posting some weekly Queens bonuses here throughout this season, including puzzles that ended up being too large or difficult or unusual for the partner project but still perfect for our audience here. This “500 on GP” puzzle was made specifically for today’s milestone posts.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools; in composite Star Battle mode a left click places a star, right click in a cell marks off the cell, and a right click on an edge or corner marks in a dot as a placement note.)
Theme: 500 on GP
Author/Opus: This is the 500th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.
Rules: Standard Star Battle rules. One star per row, column, and region.
Difficulty: 2 stars
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 1:15, Master = 2:30, Expert = 5:00
Solution: PDF and solving animation.
Note: Follow this link for other one-star Star Battle puzzles exactly like Queens, and this link for our easiest Star Battles, including many with two stars per region, which are a great way to get started on this version of the puzzle. More Star Battle puzzles can be found in these books in our e-store including our Starter Pack 5: Star Battle book.
Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our Week 1 Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.
I would suggest that you pick a different name than Queens or StarBattle/Queens for this site. Given an nxn grid and n regions, Queens has an obvious meaning: Place one (chess) queen in each region so that no queen threatens another queen. Using the name for a different puzzle type with an nxn grid and n regions seems confusing.
As explained at the top, I’m using the name that is being given to the style elsewhere to introduce the post and allow some crossing of solving audiences. I’ll go to aka Queens for now.
The queens name is technically inaccurate but fine. I’ve been doing the Linkedin puzzles for a while, and I enjoy the themes a lot. It’s especially impressive, since making 1-star star battles unique can be very challenging.
This puzzle is definitely much more interesting than the ones on Linkedin. Thanks for sharing it here!