How to Play Battleship: Rules, Strategy and How to Win

• By OnlineGames2Play Team
• Published Sep 7, 2026
• Updated Oct 12, 2026
• 9 min read

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What is Battleship?

Battleship is a two player guessing and strategy game about a hidden naval battle. It began as a pencil and paper game, later became a famous boxed board game and is also known as Sea Battle or Battleships. You cannot see your opponent's fleet, so every shot is a question and every hit or miss is a clue.

Experienced players beat beginners again and again because they search with a system instead of firing at random. You will learn that system below, and you can try it straight away in our free Battleship online game.

Battleship rules, step by step

The board

Each player has two grids of 10 rows and 10 columns. Rows are lettered A to J and columns are numbered 1 to 10, so every square has a name such as B7 or J10. One grid holds your own fleet. The other grid, often called the target grid or enemy waters, is where you track your shots at the opponent.

The ships

Every player gets the same fleet of five ships:

That is 17 squares of ship hidden somewhere among 100 squares, so a completely random shot hits only 17 percent of the time at the start of the game.

Placing the fleet

• Ships go in a straight line, either across or down. Diagonal ships are not allowed.
• Ships can never overlap, and every square of a ship must be on the board.
• Ships may touch each other in the standard rules and in our online game.
• Once the battle starts, ships cannot move.

Taking turns

1. Decide who fires first. Online, the game chooses, and players take turns going first in every rematch.
2. On your turn, call one square, such as E5.
3. Your opponent answers hit if that square holds part of a ship, or miss if it is open water.
4. When every square of a ship has been hit, the owner announces that the ship is sunk and says which one it was.
5. The turn passes to the other player. In the classic game you get one shot per turn, whether it hit or not.

How to win

The first player to sink all five enemy ships wins, so a smarter search pattern really does decide the result.

How to place your ships

Your goal is to make your fleet take as many shots as possible to find.

• Spread the fleet out. If your ships are bunched together, one lucky hit leads your opponent straight to a second ship.
• Avoid neat patterns. All ships along one edge, a tidy diagonal staircase or every ship pointing the same way are the first things an experienced player checks.
• Do not crowd the center either. The middle squares are where a smart opponent fires first, because ships fit through the middle in the most ways. A few ships near the edges, mixed with a few inside, is hard to read.
• Use touching ships as a trick. Two ships side by side can confuse a player who is following a line of hits, because the line seems to keep going after the first ship sinks.

In our game, tap Rotate to switch a ship between across and down, or Random for an instant fleet.

Battleship strategy: how to find ships faster

Strong players switch between two modes. In hunt mode they search open water for a new ship. In target mode they finish off a ship they have already hit. Each mode has its own rules.

Hunt and target

The moment you score a hit, stop searching elsewhere. Fire at the four squares next to the hit: above, below, left and right. Once you get a second hit, you know which way the ship lies, so keep firing along that line in both directions until the game tells you the ship is sunk. Only then go back to hunting.

If a line of hits gets longer than the ship that sank, you have found two touching ships. Go back to the squares beside the line to find the second one.

Search in a checkerboard pattern (parity)

Imagine the board colored like a chessboard. The smallest ship, the Destroyer, covers two squares in a row, and any two neighboring squares are always different colors. That means every ship covers at least one square of each color. So while hunting, you only need to fire at one color. That is 50 squares instead of 100, and you will still find every ship.

Once the Destroyer is sunk, the smallest ship left is three long, and you can spread your hunting shots even wider, roughly one square in every three along each row.

Think in probabilities

Ships fit through the middle of the board in many more ways than through a corner. A corner square can be covered by the Carrier in only 2 positions (one across, one down), while a central square such as E5 can be covered in 10. Early in the game, center squares are simply more likely to hold a ship. Expert players count, for every open square, how many ways the remaining ships could still fit through it, and then fire at the highest count. Our Hard computer opponent plays exactly this way.

How much does strategy help?

We ran 4,000 simulated games against random fleets to see how many shots each method needs to sink all five ships:

Simply following up your hits saves around 30 shots, and the checkerboard trick saves a few more. Probability counting pushes the number lower still.

Adjust as ships sink

Keep an eye on which ships are left. If only the Carrier remains, a gap of four open squares between misses cannot hold it, so skip it. Late in the game the leftover gaps often show exactly where the last ship must be.

How to play Battleship online with friends

You do not need a board or paper to play a friend. Our free version runs in any modern browser on phones, tablets and computers, and each player uses their own device:

1. Open Battleship and choose Play a friend.
2. Type your name and create a room. You get a six letter room code and an invite link.
3. Send the code or link to your friend by text, chat or email. They join from their own phone or computer.
4. When you are both in, the host starts the game and each player places a fleet in secret.
5. Take turns firing. Every shot appears live on both screens, and the last shot is always highlighted.

A 30 second shot clock keeps the game moving. If time runs out, a random shot is fired for you. When the battle ends, both fleets are revealed so you can see how close it really was, and in each rematch the other player fires first. There is no download and no account.

Practice against the computer

When nobody is around, choose vs Computer and pick a level:

• Easy fires at random. It is great for kids and for learning the board.
• Normal hunts around every hit until the ship sinks, much like a casual human player.
• Hard works out where your remaining ships can still fit and aims at the most likely square every turn. It is the best test of your fleet placement.

If you enjoy reading your opponent, try Connect Four or Checkers next, or browse every free board game on the site.

Frequently asked questions

Looking for more? Browse all our board games, read more guides on the OnlineGames2Play blog or head back to the free online games homepage.

Ready? Play Battleship free nowPlay the computer on Easy, Normal or Hard, or send a friend a room code. No download.Play now