Starlock is a logic grid. The board is divided into coloured regions of odd shapes, and your job is to place stars so that every row, every column and every region contains exactly one — with no two stars ever touching, not even at a corner.
There is no vocabulary, no trivia and no language in it at all, which is why it plays identically whether you learned to read in English, Hindi or Japanese. It belongs to the star battle family of pencil puzzles, which has been in puzzle magazines since the early 2000s. What is new here is that the grid is generated fresh every day, checked by a solver to have exactly one answer, and timed — so instead of "did you solve it", the question is "how fast".
The three rules
- One star per row. Every row has exactly one. Not zero, not two.
- One star per column, and one per colour region. The regions are the irregular blocks outlined in black. A region can be three cells or eighteen — it still gets exactly one star.
- Stars may never touch. Not side by side, not above and below, and not diagonally. Every star needs an empty ring around it.
How to play on screen
Tap or click a cell once to mark it with an ✕ — that is your note that a star cannot go there. Tap again to place a ★. Tap a third time to clear it. On a keyboard, move with the arrow keys and press space or enter to cycle the same three states.
The marks are not scored and not required; they exist because holding eight simultaneous eliminations in your head is how people lose two minutes. Good solvers mark heavily.
There is no vocabulary, no trivia and no language in it at all.
Scoring and the clock
The timer starts on your first tap, not when the page loads, so you can study the board for as long as you like before committing. There is no lose condition and no guess limit — everyone finishes. Your score is simply your time, measured against a par that is calculated from how much backtracking the solver needed on that particular grid. Beating par is genuinely good; the grids that look hardest are often not the ones that score hardest.
Playing against someone
When you finish, the result screen offers a challenge link. That link carries the exact grid you just solved plus your time. Whoever opens it plays the identical board and sees the head-to-head comparison the moment they place their last star. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — the whole challenge fits inside the link itself.