Star Battle: A First Look

We take a look at a Star Battle puzzle from last weekend's WPF Grand Prix, hosted by Poland. Star Battle is a beautiful logic problem - this puzzle was composed by Jan Mrozowski - and you can find it here:
gp.worldpuzzle...
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▶SOFTWARE◀
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▶ABOUT US◀
Hi! We're Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, two of the UK's most enthusiastic puzzle solvers. We have both represented the UK at the World Sudoku Championships and the World Puzzle Championships. We're also "cryptic crossword" aficionados. Mark is the eleven-time winner of The Times championship and Simon is the former record holder for most consecutive correct solutions to The Listener crossword. We hope we can help your puzzle solving while also introducing you to some of the world's best puzzles.
Thank you for watching!
Simon and Mark

[@notnotandrew]

You had me scared with those C's at the end :)

[@jenncardona5998]

I was screaming this entire video out of excitement omg this was such a cool puzzle with such amazing logic

[@Pyrois]

Love me some Star Battle! The notation did start to get quite hard to read toward the end, though. If the software supports special characters, maybe you could use asterisks for stars and hyphens for empty spaces? That way the numbers/letters would stand out more to the eye, I think.

[@stuartmcconnachie]

Pyrois: I agree. A more “solid” character shape for a star (e.g * or #) and something less “solid” (e.g. . or -) for known blanks would improve things. Much easier on the eyes that way.

[@danpowell806]

* for known true and . for known empty would be much easier to read.

[@PattyManatty]

@@stuartmcconnachie colour coded would be nice too. Make the stars bright, the known blanks black, and each potential group a different colour

[@Krevadian]

Loved the puzzle, but the notation was difficult to read. If you replaced the X's with hyphens (or some other small punctuation mark) I think that would go a long way toward making it easier for viewers to read and follow along with.

[@zacreman1303]

Loved this! Would like to see more of them.

[@bachgammon1]

Definitely my favourite video for shouting the equivalent of "He's behind you!" at the screen! Lovely logic as you say :)

[@12tone]

This was really fun! It looks like you're doing these in a spreadsheet program, have you considered using some conditional formatting to help make things easier to spot? Like, here, if you just set it to automatically highlight the Os in green and the Xs in red, you probably would've seen the 4 at 16:40 right away. It'd also make it easier to see at a glance which rows and columns were already complete. Not sure how much it'd help for the hard stuff, but it could be really useful in quickly identifying the easy things.

[@dryoshiyahu]

I was going to suggest the same thing.

[@Ruddigore]

Brilliant. If I had come across one of these before watching your video I would have been at a complete loss as to where to start. I would definitely like to see some more Star Battle puzzles in future episodes.

[@lconover05]

I love StarBattle puzzles! I would very much like to see more of them as well as the tips and tricks to solving them.

[@j0hnc00]

I feel smart for learning this puzzle and following your logic

[@adrianbourceanu9145]

Please do more Star Battles, this one was so entertaining!

What an elegant puzzle! Simple, yet challenging... Very nice!

[@JimOMoore]

Never heard of Star Battle before, but would enjoy seeing more of them.

[@nickoxssGAME]

This is one of the most fun puzzle i've seen in a while and actually felt a lot of satisfacción while watching you solve it

[@OddMartin]

Pretty cool variant, my God I were screaming at the screen when he passed the 4 in the upper right corner.. 😄

[@malloryrobinson6418]

OMG I love this! is like minesweeper and sudoku had a baby :) I am enjoying the different puzzles you have been show casing on the channel lately.

[@freddiehand6551]

Interesting that you draw a loop to signify that there is one star in a region. Personally, for regions that fit inside a 2 by 2 square, I simply draw a small circle at the centre, and for a 2 cell region I place a star on the central line. I normally don't bother for larger regions, but if I do, I would draw a line going through the cells- faster!

[@coffeedude]

Super cool puzzle! I really like the videos where you show new ones

[@CGEWNope]

Please more of these great puzzles

[@kvkaha]

This was great, thanks :) Hadn't tried this type of puzzle before. Would love to see more.

[@etopowertwon]

I liked it. Can you setup software (or use Excel's Conditional Formatting instead of software) to make X black? It was somewhat confusing to watch. You even confused yourself by almost missing C in the end.

[@wooshie9403]

love star battles please do more of them!

[@omerdor1460]

These puzzles are really cool! please make more!

[@Frie_Jemi]

keep 'em coming! love these fun variants

[@IcyWasTakenAgain]

Cool type of puzzles, definitely do more of those please :)

[@WildAnimalChannel]

I would put the stars as coloured squares to make it look more interesting.

[@rabidsamfan]

Very nice! I will have to look for these puzzles.

[@Robinmine]

Nice, it's one of my favourite puzzle types as well! You can find around 1000 more in the android app 'Park Seasons' in Google Play, although they use trees instead of stars. I hope to see more of this :)

[@saintjynr]

The notations started to get kinda confusing at some point. On the video Tom Collyer did not long ago on the channel he used dots to show where 1s and 9s couldn't be placed, I think that was a great way to keep the board clean for the audience while still making visible notations

[@Jazmine-Xena]

I really enjoyed this puzzle please do more if possible

[@vSimCO]

Nice, I've seen these before but never attempted to solve them.

[@albertlyngpetersen8702]

Is there a site to do more of these puzzles online. I would like to try more of them. And it would also be nice to see you guys do more of them.

[@RubenJuventino]

Will you release a star battle app? I've been using Star Battle Go which is ok, but I miss the functionality of your sudoku apps where you can mark multiple cells and also put notes in the grid.

[@FazalFariz]

Look how far we've come.

[@scottishbookworm8506]

Think it's just me but really struggling to see the boxes. My brain keeps moving the bold lines

[@denielsb8010]

Lovely ;)

[@shane8037]

Not sure who's more like a Batman villain... the people who come up with these puzzle types, the people who make them, or Simon.

[@CrackingTheCryptic]

Definitely Simon! :-) ... from Mark

[@nicktecky55]

Lots of comments about the graphics. I'll sling in my three ha'porth. Large numbers of 'X's are hard on the eye, if you scan them, you can even get a 'strobing' effect (nothing to do with camera scanning) which makes it hard for the eye to focus. Why not just reverse the usage? After all 'X' in mathematics signifies an unknown, whereas what it signifies here is nothing of the sort; it signifies an empty position, so 'O', the empty set or zero would be more accurate. Then the 'X' as a star will stand out, even more so if it was blue. As for the rest, why use numbers at all? Again they are not used in mathematics to label different unknowns, letters are. If the programme allows the use of lower case letters, so much the better. Much easier on the eye as well.

[@Questerer]

I love this a lot. Please make more of these

[@AmIOrTheOtherCrazy]

www.braingle.com/games/starbattle/

[@notchmath9642]

What about the 9s? Why can’t 9s be a symbol?

[@orNICOrynque]

How can we find the tournament puzzles ?

[@HitLuca94]

I see that he is not very consistent with the way he operates, and this got him missing the X in r1c8. But I saw this issue in other videos, he just doesn't update the board as soon as an option is ruled out. He is surely a pro but I feel this should be a behaviour to be fixed

[@ManiacalKiwi]

This hurt my eyeballs!

[@FinetalPies]

16:15 It's really funny that you trace the full L shape of the 4's there when obviously one of those is impossible since there's a star right next to it

[@FinetalPies]

But I mean I would've had no idea how to even start this puzzle, really cool tricks on display here.

[@matthewdodd1262]

Didnt complete the puzzle until he almost ended the video. Need to be more careful