Enemy waters — fire here
Your waters
Fire at a square in enemy waters
| Click or tap a square | Fire at that square in enemy waters. |
| New game | Redeploy both fleets at random and start over. |
Battleship is the classic game of hidden fleets and educated guesses. Your ships and the enemy's sit on separate grids, invisible to the other side. You call out squares to fire on, the game tells you hit or miss, and from that trickle of information you piece together where the enemy ships are and sink them one by one.
Under the guesswork is a real search problem. Early shots are about covering the board efficiently to find any ship at all; once you land a hit, the game changes into working out the ship's orientation and finishing it before wasting shots. Good players lose far fewer turns to empty water than the randomness suggests.
Do not fire at random. Because the smallest ship covers two squares, firing in a checkerboard pattern, every other square, still cannot miss a ship entirely while using half as many shots to find one. Only switch to filling in squares once you have a hit to chase.
The moment you score a hit, stop searching and start hunting. Fire at the four squares next to the hit to find the direction the ship runs, then continue along that line. Going back to random shots after a hit wastes the information you just paid for.
When a ship refuses to sink after several hits in a line, remember two ships can sit next to each other. If a shot along your expected line misses, the ship may have ended and a second one begins beside it. Re-check the perpendicular squares.
Keep a mental note of which ship sizes remain. Once the larger ships are gone, you know every remaining target is short, so you can space your search shots more widely and still be sure of catching them.
No. Their grid is hidden, and you learn its layout only through the hits and misses your shots return.
Yes. In this version landing a hit lets you fire again, which rewards pressing an advantage once you find a ship.
Randomly at the start of each game, for both you and the computer, so no two games are alike.
Sink every enemy ship before the computer sinks yours.
Nothing at all. The whole of Battleship is built into the page itself, which is why there is no loading bar and no waiting before you can play.