Tents & Trees › Guide
Star Battle vs Tents Puzzle: Quotas, Adjacency & Rules
Star Battle and Tents & Trees share the exact same eight-neighbour no-touch restriction, so 2×2 block limits and shadow eliminations work identically in both games. They differ in how pieces are grouped: Star Battle uses colour regions with fixed quotas, while Tents pairs each tent orthogonally with a tree and varies the count per row and column.
If you already solve LinkedIn-style Queens or Star Battle, you already know half of Tents & Trees. Understanding what transfers—and what changes when regions are replaced by trees—lets you pick up Tents in under a minute.
Star Battle (Queens) and Tents & Trees compared
| Rule or mechanic | One-star Star Battle / Queens | Two-star Star Battle | Tents & Trees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pieces touch orthogonally or diagonally? | Never (8-neighbour ban) | Never (8-neighbour ban) | Never (8-neighbour ban) |
| Max pieces in any 2×2 block | At most 1 | At most 1 | At most 1 |
| Row and column quotas | Fixed: 1 per row and column | Fixed: 2 per row and column | Variable: 0, 1, 2… shown outside each line |
| Third constraint | 1 star per outlined colour region | 2 stars per outlined colour region | 1-to-1 orthogonal pairing with given trees |
| Immediate zero-line eliminations | Never (every line has 1 star) | Never (every line has 2 stars) | Common: any 0 row/column clears at once |
Side-by-side: colour regions versus tree pairings
Notice how both 5×5 boards below forbid any two placed pieces from touching at an edge or a corner. On the left, regions A–E each claim one star. On the right, five trees each claim an orthogonally adjacent tent while matching the outside row counts (1, 1, 2, 1, 0) and column counts (1, 1, 1, 0, 2). The zero row shows a deduction Star Battle never offers: that whole line is grass from the start.
Play Tents & Trees →Play Star Battle →
Three Star Battle habits that work directly in Tents
1. 2×2 and domino capacity
Because tents cannot touch even diagonally, any two adjacent empty cells in a row or column can contain at most one tent. When a column needs 3 tents on an 8×8 board and only five empty cells remain—grouped as two adjacent pairs and one single cell—the single cell is forced to be a tent, and each pair holds exactly one. Read more in the Star Battle 2×2 capacity guide.
2. Shadow / cell elimination
In Star Battle, a cell that touches every remaining candidate of a small two-cell region cannot hold a star (cell elimination). In Tents, an unmatched tree with only two orthogonal candidate cells acts just like a two-cell region: any outside square that touches both of that tree's options must be marked as grass.
3. Watch out for one difference: a tent does not always clear its line
In one-star Queens, placing a piece immediately clears its entire row and column. In Tents (as in two-star Star Battle), check the outside number first: if a row needs 2 or 3 tents, only the 8 immediate neighbours of your new tent are cleared until the full line quota is met.
References
Compare Grandmaster Puzzles' Star Battle rules with BrainBashers' Tents puzzle rules. All boards and practice pools on Solvedle are original algorithmically verified puzzles.