Battleship

How to Play Battleship

Battleship is the classic game of naval hide-and-seek on two 10x10 grids. First, position your five ships - the Carrier (5 squares), Battleship (4), Cruiser (3), Submarine (3), and Destroyer (2) - anywhere on your grid, horizontally or vertically. Ships may sit side by side but can't overlap or hang off the edge. Click a square to place the selected ship, press R to rotate, or hit Random for an instant layout.

Then the shooting starts. Each turn you fire one shot at the enemy grid: a red ✕ means hit, a blue splash means miss. Land a hit on every square of a ship and it's sunk - the wreck is outlined so you can rule out the water around your search. Sink all five enemy ships before the AI (or your friend in multiplayer) sinks yours, and the ocean is yours.

Strategy Tips

• Hunt on a checkerboard - every ship is at least two squares long, so firing only at alternating squares still touches every possible ship while halving your search space.
• After a hit, probe in a line - test the four neighbors, and once you get a second hit, keep firing along that line until the ship sinks or you miss off both ends.
• Don't cluster your fleet - packing ships into one corner means a single lucky hit leads the enemy straight to the rest. Spread out, and vary edges versus center between games.
• Track what's left to find - if only the Destroyer (2) remains, gaps of a single square between misses can't hide it. Aim where the longest unsunk ship still fits.
• Use sunk ships as information - when a ship goes down you know its exact footprint. Any leftover hits nearby must belong to a different ship, so keep working that area.

Playing Battleship on PlayVersusAI

Classic Battleship on a 10x10 grid. You place your fleet, then the two sides alternate calling shots at coordinates, and the first to sink every enemy ship wins. You can position your ships manually or have them placed at random if you would rather get straight to the shooting.

This is the one game here where the AI has no game tree to search, because it cannot see your board. Instead the hard opponent builds a probability density map: for each ship you have left, it counts every legal position that ship could still occupy, tallies how often each unfired square is covered, and fires at the square covered most often. Once it scores a hit it switches to hunting along the likely axis. It is not guessing — it is fishing exactly where the fish statistically are.

What's on This Page

• Four difficulty levels — switch between Easy, Medium, Hard and AI Training at any time, including mid-game.
• Online multiplayer — play a friend in real time using a private room code, or take on a stranger from the public lobby.
• Tracked results — wins count toward your profile statistics and the site leaderboard.
• No account required — the full game is playable as a guest, on desktop, tablet or phone.

Easy fires more or less at random and follows up hits crudely. Medium uses a sensible search pattern. Hard runs the full probability map and finds your fleet disturbingly fast. AI Training adds parity — only firing on squares that could contain the smallest remaining ship — which cuts the number of shots it needs to find you almost in half.

Mistakes That Lose Games

• Hiding ships in the corners. Corners are covered by fewer legal ship placements, which sounds good until you realise the AI knows that too and adjusts its map accordingly. Edges are more predictable than they feel.
• Placing ships next to each other. Once the AI finds one, its follow-up shots around the hit tend to find the neighbour for free.
• Firing randomly yourself. Use a parity pattern — check every other square — and you cannot miss a ship of length two or more while spending half the shots.
• Abandoning a hit too early. When you hit, work the axis fully before moving on. Half-sunk ships left behind cost you the game late.

Battleship Questions

For the complete rules, the deeper strategy and the history of the game, read the full Battleship guide, or browse guides for all 20 games.