Two Not Touch: Why Star Battle Has So Many Names

There's a puzzle that the World Puzzle Championship crowd calls Star Battle, The New York Times prints as Two Not Touch, hurried searchers type as "2 no touch," and one popular app publishes simply as Stars. Four names, one puzzle. If you've ever solved it in one place and then couldn't find it anywhere else because you didn't know what to type, this is the map.

Puzzle naming is messier than you'd think, and it's rarely an accident. Names get attached by whoever carries a puzzle to a new audience, and the bigger the audience, the stickier the name. Sudoku spent years in American magazines as "Number Place" until a Japanese publisher renamed it; the new name went on to conquer the planet and the old one became a trivia answer. Star Battle is living through its own version of that story, except instead of one rename it's collecting a brand name from every platform that publishes it.

Star Battle: The Competition Name

Star Battle is what the puzzle is called in the competitive logic-puzzle world, and it's the original. The debut most commonly cited is the 2003 World Puzzle Championship, and it's been a fixture of championship rounds and puzzle-club publications ever since. The name is literal: you place stars on a grid and fight the constraints for every cell.

One underrated thing about "Star Battle" as a name: it scales. Championship setters publish 1-star, 2-star, and 3-star variants; the count of stars per row, column, and region is a dial, not a rule. "Star Battle" covers all of them. Hold that thought, because it's exactly where the newspaper name gets into trouble.

Two Not Touch: The Newspaper Name

"Two Not Touch" is The New York Times' name for it. The boards themselves are built by Jim Bumgardner, better known online as Krazydad. The NYT branding is why searches for "two not touch puzzle" and "2 no touch" took off: a newspaper audience met the puzzle under that name, most of them with no idea it had a competition history stretching back years.

Say this for the name: it's genuinely clever. It compresses both core rules into three words: two stars per row, column, and region, and no two stars may touch, not even diagonally. "2 No Touch" isn't an official name anywhere as far as we can tell; it's just what happens to the NYT's name after a trip through a search bar. If the NYT-style puzzle is what you're after, our Two Not Touch page is where to play it — same two-star puzzle, free, fresh boards daily.

Queens: The Name That Doesn't Belong on This List

A mix-up we see constantly: people credit LinkedIn with "Two Not Touch." LinkedIn has never used that name. Its daily logic game is Queens, a close cousin rather than the same puzzle: one queen per row, column, and coloured region, no two queens touching. Same no-touching DNA, half the stars, different name from a different company. We get why people blur them — both games surged around the same time, and to a newcomer every "place things that can't touch" grid looks alike. But conflate them and you'll spend your evening in the wrong search results.

Stars: The App Name

The fourth name belongs to Inkwell Games, whose app publishes the puzzle as Stars — you'll see it searched as "Inkwell Stars." Same grid, same two stars per row, column, and region, same no-touch rule. We publish unofficial step-by-step walkthroughs for those boards, and our Inkwell Stars page explains how the app's puzzles map onto standard Star Battle. (We're not affiliated with Inkwell, or the NYT, or LinkedIn. We just play everything in this puzzle family and take notes.)

Same Puzzle, Same Logic, Any Label

So is Two Not Touch actually the same puzzle as Star Battle? For the two-star version, yes — identical, down to the last deduction. Put a star at row 4, column 5 of a 9×9 board and all eight neighbours die on the spot: row 3, columns 4 through 6; row 4, columns 4 and 6; row 5, columns 4 through 6. If row 4 already had its other star sitting at column 1, the rest of the row goes too. That chain of reasoning runs letter-for-letter whether the masthead says Star Battle, Two Not Touch, or Stars.

One honest caveat: "Two Not Touch" only describes the two-star form. Hand a Two Not Touch devotee a 1-star or 3-star championship board and the name stops making sense while the puzzle carries on fine. That's the tell. Star Battle is the species; Two Not Touch is one well-marketed specimen.

What We Call It, and Why

We use "Star Battle," and it's a deliberate choice. It's the competition name, it predates the brands, and it covers every variant instead of just the two-star one. But we'll say something puzzle purists won't: the brand names were good for this puzzle. "Star Battle" spent years as a connoisseur's secret. "Two Not Touch" put it in front of newspaper readers, and Queens pulled a whole adjacent audience in through LinkedIn. More solvers beats purer terminology, every time.

Whatever you first knew it as, it's here every day under its proper name: four new Star Battle puzzles daily, easy through expert, every one solvable by pure logic with no guessing. Call it whatever you like once you're solving.