Star Battle 5 - Action at a Distance
The Puzzle
For the first time since making this blog, I have a new logic puzzle! This one's a Star Battle, the fifth one I've created. You can solve online here, and for the rules:
- Place a star into some of the cells.
- Stars cannot be horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent.
- The number at the top of the grid indicates how many stars are in each row, column and outlined region.
Spoilers Below! Constructor Notes
It was pretty tricky for me to get this puzzle to work—it took about 2 hours to construct. I had various ideas for deductions that involved using regions on different corners of the board, which ultimately earned this puzzle its title of "Action at a Distance."
This is probably my hardest star battle to date, largely driven by the start, with the intended break-in spanning three corners of the board.
For some other random tidbits:
- In an earlier version of the puzzle, I incorrectly deduced that R10C2 was not a star at some point in the middle, and from that alone was able to solve almost all of the puzzle with only 6/10 of the regions drawn in. I thought the logic for that was cool, so the bottom region exists basically to make that happen.
- In a similar vein to the above, without drawing the borders in for three of the four regions in the bottom right, you can deduce the location of all of the stars with the exception of a few pairs in the bottom right; the shapes of these reasons were an attempt to disambiguate these pairs while giving minimal other information.
- It took several tries to get a working version of the bottom left region. I kept accidentally picking shapes that caused a contradiction in the top right of the board, my own theme coming back to bite me!
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