Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Intro

For this Hybrid Star Battle Series I will be sharing a new puzzle each week combining Star Battle with another puzzle genre. This week's genre is Paintarea.

With many of these genres, there are rules that I choose not to use in my hybrid - in this case, Paintarea allows clues which give the number of bordering shaded cells, but I preferred not to in this puzzle. When that happens, I leave the unnecessary rules off, and still say "standard rules apply", even though it's a subset. What do you think, should I keep the unnecessary rules for completeness, or leave them off for simplicity?

Rules

Standard Paintarea rules apply, and standard Star Battle (Small Regions) rules apply to the unshaded regions.

• Paintarea: Shade some cells so that each region is either fully shaded or fully unshaded and all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. No 2x2 area may be entirely shaded or unshaded.

• Star Battle (Small Regions): Place stars into some cells such that each row and column contains exactly 2 stars, and each unshaded region contains 1 star. Stars may not touch one another, not even diagonally.

Links

Solve on Penpa+

8x8 2-star Example (Penpa+ link):