Starstruck May 23, 2026 | Netflix Puzzled

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hello. Let's do the Netflix puzzled star struck for May 23rd. We'll do the easy, then the hard. The easy is called S tier. Let's play it.

[00:00:08]All right. So, the way we play this game is in each row, each column and each colored region. We need exactly one star. In addition to that, stars can't touch each other. So, a star here and a star here would be disab. All right. So, I'm going to start with this two cell region here. Two cell regions always eliminate from the rest of the row, but also the two above and two below because they always touch wherever the star would be in yellow.

[00:00:30]That leaves just one place for a star in green, and one place in yellow, one place in red, one place in blue, one place in indigo, uh, orange for the row, and then one place in brown. All right, that was a plonker for sure. The plunkiest of plonkers, I suppose.

[00:00:46]Um, let's go and do the hard now. It's called Another Life.

[00:00:54]Okay. So, I'm seeing like the start of what might be an X-wing. Like we've got we've got kind like look for a rectangle, right?

[00:01:04]Like we're curving like a rectangle.

[00:01:07]Kind of still curving like a rectangle, but then like maybe Oh, yeah. Okay. So, all we have to do is this top row first.

[00:01:15]This top row here, I mean, indigo, right? Eliminates from the rest of this row. And so now you can actually see you can actually see our rectangle here.

[00:01:27]Uh wait, where is it?

[00:01:30]Hold on. So Oh, uh this is what I was thinking. Does this work?

[00:01:39]Oh no, sorry. We need to do a little bit more. The green is these three. And so that that's out. I don't know how I ignored a bunch of gray. In my head, it looked like a rectangle, but I guess we got there. Um, okay.

[00:01:53]So, we do have a rectangle here. Um, what am I talking about? So, the the hint system, we'll call this an X-wing.

[00:02:00]I am not fond of calling it an X-wing. I think that there's a different strategy in this game that would be considered the same as a Sudokco X-wing. We can call it the rectangle strategy, though.

[00:02:08]So, what we're looking at is I'm just going to highlight these rows a little bit better. We're looking at these two rows here.

[00:02:16]But we're also looking at these two columns.

[00:02:20]This column and then this column here.

[00:02:24]We and we identified a rectangle before.

[00:02:26]Um you know it's not like I just randomly picked these, right? So the key the key deduction here is that um we are going to need four stars because orange is completely in there, blue is completely in there, gray is now completely in there, and brown is now completely in there because of uh stuff we've xed. And so wherever those four regions place their one star, it's going to be in these two columns or these two rows. Um now I can tell you it's not going to be in both. It's not going to be at the intersections because if we were to put a star at the intersection of a row or column here, then um what's going to happen is I'll only be able to place two more stars because the only way to get four stars is to have a unique one in this row, a unique one in this row, unique one in this column, and a unique one in this column. If I start putting them in the corners, then that's the star for both this row and this column. It's not unique, and so it double counts, but we're not allowed to double count because each region needs its own star. And so we can eliminate the intersections, but also if you're not those four colors, we can't put a fifth star in these two rows on these two columns. Each row and column only has at most one or has exactly one. And so uh four I have to be careful here. If you're not gray or brown in this column, if you're not blue or gray in this column, if you're not blue or orange in this column, and if you're not orange or brown in this row, then you don't get a star. All right, that too. Okay. So now blue uh now green is down to these two.

[00:03:55]So that's eliminated. That places this brown. Um that places the one in this region, the one in purple.

[00:04:06]Uh the one in yellow, green and orange and blue, indigo, gray and red. Okay.

[00:04:18]So I think we've had a few X-wings in a row. They're really trying to teach that X-wing. Um, and that it's not always there from immediately from the start, but like it's it's broadcast pretty well even in this puzzle like having this and this like, oh, can we form a rectangle?

[00:04:31]You kind of see it and then you go, oh, there's this thing and then there's this thing that actually give it to us. Okay, cool. Well, how'd you do?