This page used to send you off to Amazon to hunt for puzzle books. That advice is retired. We publish five printable Star Battle packs of our own: Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, and Mixed. They're free. The one condition, stated here instead of sprung on you at the download button: you need a free account. That's it. No payment, no catch in paragraph nine.
What's Actually in Each Pack
Four packs are single-difficulty — Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert — twenty puzzles each. The fifth, Mixed, is sixteen puzzles that climb from easy to expert, four at each level, in order. Everything is a 2-star Star Battle: two stars per row, two per column, two per region, no two stars touching, not even diagonally.
Each pack is a PDF: a cover page restating the rules (useful when you hand a sheet to someone who's never played), then four puzzles per page. Every puzzle is captioned with its number, difficulty, and grid size, so a page torn out and taken on a train still tells you what you're holding.
There are no answer keys. That's deliberate. Every grid in these packs went through our solver before it went into a PDF, and the solver confirms two things: one solution exists, and a chain of pure logic reaches it — even in the Expert pack, which is pulled from the top of our difficulty grader's scale and still never needs a guess. If your finished grid checks out in every row, column, and region, that's the solution. There isn't another one. An answer key would be extra pages confirming what the grid already told you.
Which Pack to Start With
If you're new, take Easy and don't feel weird about it. Twenty gentle grids is roughly what it takes for the no-touching rule to become automatic instead of a thing you consciously check. Easy is also the pack we'd hand to a kid. If that's your situation, our guide to Star Battle for kids covers teaching the rules without draining the fun out of them, and a printed pack on the kitchen table is its natural companion. Kids do better with paper anyway. A pencil is less precious than your phone.
Medium is the honest default for anyone who's solved a dozen puzzles. Hard assumes real technique — elimination habits, region confinement — and will stall you without it. Expert is only worth taking if Hard has stopped feeling hard.
Mixed is the one we'd print for a trip, and the right pick when you don't know how good the person you're printing for is. It's also quietly the best diagnostic we offer: wherever you stall in the Mixed pack is the single-difficulty pack to download next.
How Downloading Works
Go to the packs page, pick a pack, click download. Not signed in? You'll be asked to create a free account first. That's the only gate. After that you can download any pack, as many times as you like. The same account carries your solving streaks and archive access on the site, so it isn't a throwaway signup.
The PDFs are laid out for A4. On US Letter, choose "fit to page" and everything lands fine; the margins are generous. A full pack is a handful of sheets, fewer if you print double-sided.
When Paper Beats the Screen
We'll be straight about this: most days, the screen wins. Digital hands you a fresh puzzle every morning, catches mistakes instantly, and tracks your streak. That's why the daily puzzles are the core of the site and the packs are the sidecar.
Four situations flip it.
Flights and dead zones. No battery, no signal, no charging anxiety. Sixteen Mixed-pack puzzles is a solid short-haul flight.
Kids. Handing a nine-year-old your phone starts a negotiation. Handing them a sheet and a pencil starts a puzzle. Paper also lets two people lean over the same grid, which no app has ever done well.
The hour before bed. If you're keeping screens out of it, a paper puzzle is one of the few genuinely absorbing things that qualifies.
Learning to mark properly. The underrated one. It gets its own section.
Solving on Paper: The Pencil X
Here's what marking looks like in practice. Say you're on a 9×9 grid and you've just placed a star at row 4, column 6. On screen, the neighbors light up as blocked for you. On paper, you do it yourself: a small X in each of the eight surrounding cells. Later, when row 4's second star lands at column 2, you sweep the rest of the row — X out columns 1, 3, 4, 8, and 9, the first two because they touch the new star, the rest because the row is full.
That's bookkeeping, and it changes how you think. On a screen an X costs nothing: one tap on, one tap off, so it's easy to half-commit and let the error-checking catch you. In pencil an X is a small claim that the cell is dead, and knowing you can erase it is exactly what should make you bold about writing it. Mark every elimination the moment you deduce it. Solvers who stall on hard puzzles are almost always the ones keeping eliminations in their head, and paper, where nothing is tracked for you, is where that habit gets built or gets exposed.
Two notes from our own printed sheets. Use pencil, not pen; even good solvers misread a region boundary once a pack. And if a Hard or Expert grid has regions that interlock tightly, lightly shade alternate regions before you start. Thirty seconds of shading saves five minutes of squinting.
Paper for the Trip, Pixels for the Streak
The packs are a snapshot: download once, solve at your own pace, no clock. The daily Star Battle puzzles are the opposite — four new ones a day, one per difficulty, streak on the line. So are the daily Queens puzzles, three a day, if you want a second game in the rotation. They aren't competing formats. Print a pack for the suitcase, keep the daily habit for the desk, and let one account cover all of it.