Two Not Touch Puzzles

Since April 2020, I have been supplying Star Battle puzzles to the New York Times, where they are being published as 'Two Not Touch'. You'll find many more of these delightful puzzles, in 1-Star, 2-Star and 3-Star varieties, here on my website on the Printable Star Battle page. I also carry Interactive Star Battle puzzles which work nicely on phones and tablets. Warning: These puzzles are very addictive!

If you like Two Not Touch puzzles, I think you'll also like my new puzzle 7 Queens, which is a Star Battle variant that uses Chess Queens instead of stars. You can try it out here.

Every day from Monday thru Saturday, the Times publishes an easy puzzle, and a medium-difficulty puzzle. These correspond to book numbers 1-35 in my collections (which increase in difficulty from book 1 to book 100). Those higher book numbers contain significantly more challenging puzzles.

If you have a Kindle Scribe, Remarkable 2, Onyx Boox or a comparable e-ink tablet, I am now producing special PDFs for those devices, that allow you to preview the answer with a single tap. This is about as close to the paper experience as you can get on a digital device, and is a pretty nice experience! Here is a set of 60 sample puzzles in this format for you to upload to your tablet. You'll find more puzzles in my Etsy shop. Multiple volumes are available at a steep discount. These are the same puzzles found in my paper books, sold on Amazon, but cost about 40% less, due to the lower cost of 1s and 0s.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, you might like this app Star Battle Go which is chock-full of my puzzles. The interactive puzzles I have here on the site are free, but this app is great too (especially if you don't have a reliable internet connection), and your in-app purchases help support this website. You'll find Star Battle Go at the Apple App Store.

Electonic devices aren't your thing? Addicted to my puzzles in the print-edition of the Times? Here are a whole lot more that you can solve with a pencil! My new portable volumes of Two Not Touch / Star Battle puzzles can be found on Amazon. If you buy one of my books, please leave a review!

If you are new to this puzzle, you may find this introductory tutorial helpful.

If you can already solve the easiest ones, but are struggling with harder puzzles, check out my intermediate tutorial.

Here is my advanced tutorial, which covers a number of useful rules-of-thumb for solving these puzzles.

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Think you've found an alternate solution? Look closely at your alternate solution. Are there two stars that are diagonally adjacent? If so, it is not a valid solution (and you are not the first to make this mistake). All my puzzles have a single, valid solution. If you believe otherwise, send me a snapshot.

Need help solving today's puzzle? Try my handy-dandy Two Not Touch Solution page, which will walk you through the solution for today's and other recent NYT puzzles.

Want to chat with me or other solvers? Check out our Discord community!

Enjoy the puzzles!

— Jim Bumgardner