🚢 Battleship

How to play

Both fleets are five ships of 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2 cells, placed at random on separate ten by ten grids. You fire first: pick a square in Enemy Waters and it is marked at once as a hit or a miss. The computer then fires back at your fleet, shown on the second grid. The game ends when one fleet is sunk completely.

• Enemy Waters grid — click or tap a square to fire at it. Squares you have already fired at are ignored.
• Your Fleet grid — display only. It shows your ships and where the computer has fired.
• New Game button — replaces both fleets with fresh random layouts and resets the counters.

Scoring

There are no points, only three counters: Shots is every square you have fired at, Hits is how many found a ship, and Sunk counts destroyed enemy ships out of five. A ship sinks when all its cells are hit, and the message says how many remain. Sinking all five is a win; if the computer sinks yours first you lose. The enemy fleet occupies 17 of the 100 squares, so a perfect game is 17 shots.

Tips

• Search in a checkerboard pattern rather than sweeping row by row. The smallest ship is two cells, so every second square still cannot miss anything.
• After a hit, fire above, below, left and right of it to find the ship's direction, then run along that line.
• Track which sizes are still afloat. Once the 5 and the 4 are gone, large open stretches are no longer worth searching.
• Ships may touch each other, so a hit next to an already sunk ship can belong to a different one.

Frequently asked questions