Strategy · 6 min read
The Starsweep Playbook: Forced Placements and the Art of Crossing Out
One star per row, column and color region, none touching. The board never needs a guess — it needs you to cross out more cells first.
Open with the smallest region
Every region owns exactly one star, and a region of two or three cells has almost nowhere to put it. Whichever of its cells holds the star, every cell that touches all of them is dead — stars cannot share a corner, let alone an edge — so you can cross those neighbors out before you place anything. On a 7 × 7 board a two-cell region often settles its row or column in a single move.
Then look at the row and column the small region occupies. Its star takes that row, so no other region may place a star in that row: cross every cell of the row that lies outside the small region. That one deduction routinely eliminates five or six cells and pulls the next region into focus.
Count regions against rows
The argument that breaks the middle of every 8 × 8 is a counting one. If two regions fit entirely inside two rows, those two rows' stars must belong to those two regions — there are only two stars to go around — so every cell in those rows that belongs to any other region is out. The same holds for columns, and for three regions inside three rows. Look for it whenever a couple of regions sit stacked on top of one another.
The mirror image is just as useful. If a region spans exactly one column, its star takes that column and no other region may use it: cross the whole column outside the region. Tall thin regions and wide flat regions are gifts, because they own a line outright.
Cross before you star
Starsweep is won by elimination, not inspiration. Tap a cell once to cross it out; the mark is free, never judged and never counted, and it is where the actual solving happens. Every cross you place is a fact about the board that stays visible, so the more you mark, the less you have to hold in your head. When a row is down to one uncrossed cell, that cell is the star — and it cost you nothing to have been thorough.
Auto-cross is on by default and does the mechanical half of this for you: place a correct star and its row, column, region and eight neighbors are crossed automatically. Leave it on. Your job is the other half — the crosses that follow from reasoning about regions, not from a star already placed.
Price every hunch at 300 points
The scoring treats your finish as mistakes plus one out of a budget of four, with every unused step worth 300 points: a clean board banks 900, one mistake 600, two 300, and the third mistake ends the game. Speed is worth at most 240 points across the ten-minute cap, so a faster board can never outrank a cleaner one. Read that as a rule: a star you cannot prove is a 300-point bet with a one-in-two or worse chance of paying off, plus a step toward losing the whole day.
When two cells both look possible for a region's star, do not pick. Cross out something else — look for a neighboring region's forced line, or the counting argument — and one of the two candidates will die on its own. The board is built so that this always works.
The Hint is a row, not a cell
A Hint places the correct star for the row of the cell you last tapped (or the first row still missing one) for 100 points. It never counts as a mistake, but it rules out a Perfect run and the Pure Starsweep achievements. Because a wrong star costs 300 and a Hint costs 100, the Hint is the right call the moment you are genuinely about to guess — tap a cell in the row you are stuck on first, so the hint lands where you need it.
Use Undo before you use the Hint. Undo is free and unlimited, walking back stars and crosses alike, and a wrong cross earlier in the solve is the most common reason a board seems to have no legal move. Step back a few actions, recheck the crosses against the region rule, and the "impossible" board usually resolves.
Thursday is a different game
Monday to Wednesday the board is 7 × 7; Thursday to Sunday it is 8 × 8, and the extra row is more than a 15% increase in difficulty. Eight regions give the counting argument more to bite on and the small-region opening less to work with, so the middle game — regions against rows — is where the weekend boards are decided. If you only have time to practice one thing, practice the count.
Pro Unlimited adds a 9 × 9 board, which is the best training there is: it forces the counting logic on every board and makes the daily 8 × 8 feel roomy. As with every More Games title, none of this touches your Daily Sweep — Starsweep is extra XP, medals and a leaderboard, not a sweep cell.
Put it into practice — Wordocious gives everyone the same daily puzzle in every mode, so you can test these ideas and compare your result on the global leaderboard.