About Battleship
Battleship is a guessing game of naval combat. Each side hides a fleet on a 10x10 grid and takes shots at the other's waters, trying to sink every ship first. This version adds a twist: every hit earns another shot.
How to play
- Each side has a 10x10 grid and a fleet of five ships of lengths 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2, placed horizontally or vertically. Both fleets are placed at random; ships may touch each other.
- You fire first by choosing a square in the enemy waters. A miss is marked with a dot, a hit with an explosion, and a fully sunk ship turns dark red.
- If your shot hits a ship, you fire again. A miss passes the turn to the computer. The computer follows the same rule.
- The first side to sink all five enemy ships wins.
- If you win, your score is 100 minus the number of shots you fired, with a minimum of 1, so fewer shots means a better score.
Controls
- Click or tap any untouched square in the Enemy waters grid to fire at it.
- Before your first shot, use Shuffle my fleet to rearrange your own ships at random as often as you like. Ships cannot be placed by hand.
- Your own fleet is shown on the Your fleet grid so you can follow the computer's shots.
Tips and strategy
- Hunt on a checkerboard pattern. Every ship is at least two squares long, so it must cover a square of one colour; there is no need to fire at both.
- After a hit, fire at the four neighbours to find the ship's direction, then follow the line until it sinks.
- Because sunk ships change colour, you always know when a ship is finished. Move on immediately instead of probing around it.
- As the small ships go down, widen your pattern. If only the 5-square ship is left, you need far fewer shots to cover the open water.
- Use Shuffle my fleet if your ships are bunched together; adjacent ships let the computer's follow-up shots find two ships at once.
Background
Battleship began as a pencil-and-paper game played on squared paper, with versions known from around the time of the First World War. It was later sold as a printed pad game, and in 1967 Milton Bradley released a plastic version with pegs that made it a household name. The hunt and target method used by the computer here, firing on a checkerboard until a hit and then searching around it, is a common way people play the game well.
Questions
- How does the computer aim?
- When it has hit a ship that is not yet sunk, it fires at random squares next to its hits. Otherwise it fires at random on a checkerboard pattern, falling back to any open square once those run out.
- Can I place my own ships?
- Not square by square. Before your first shot you can press Shuffle my fleet to get a new random layout as many times as you like.
- Why did I get to fire twice?
- In this version every hit earns another shot, for both you and the computer. Your turn ends on the first miss.