I saw the standard Star Battle puzzle on the Dutch Puzzle Championship in 2003, some month before the WPC. (It was in Arnheim.) The organizers called this type Star Battle on the WPC, and this was one of the novelties. I dont remember that when I saw this puzzle on the DPC it was English or Dutch language.
I spoke about the standard variant, but I had already known this type. I wrote last time Erich Friedman's site, there was another popular site in these years: Tim Peeter's puzzles.
The booklet-04 contains a really interesting puzzle with name of Cattle. And the description speak about farmers and cows. The puzzle is relativly easy, you have to mark some squares, but the carnish really nice. Regions as corral, and marked cells as cows in the corrals. I can declare I like the creative puzzle names.
When I created my first Star Battle puzzles after the WPC I used the translate of Cows. Hence this is the usual Hungarian name of type. However, this wasnt enough reason why we should use this name in 2010. I knew Star Battle is current, and I dont like to change without good reason.
When we collected the possible Star Battle variants we had a little problem. How can we interpret the Cows and Bulls puzzle with stars? Stars and planets? This is so far-fetced. Moving Stars? More worst.
The only Hungarian World Champion (Pál Madarassy) suggested we should use the Hungarian name, bacause this is a Hungarian Championship. This wasn't an easy decision, but finally we chose this alternative.
In this week I would like to present one more Star Battle variant, which we didnt use on the WPC.
This was the least of all Star Battle, because it doesn't contain regions.
Simple Star Battle
Place some stars in the grid so every row, column will contain 2 stars. The stars cannot touch each other, not even diagonally.
Puzzles by Gyula Slenker
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One of these:
Each puzzle solvable logically.
This was solvable bottom-up, the vertical checking coming into play only very late near the end.
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