Battleship Game Strategy: Rules and the Best Way to Search

Battleship is a guessing game for two players, each hiding a fleet on a grid and taking turns to call shots at the other’s grid. It feels like pure luck, but some ways of searching are far better than others. We simulated thousands of games to show how much a simple strategy helps.

Rules

1. Each player has a 10 by 10 grid, with rows A to J and columns 1 to 10.
2. Each player secretly places five ships, across or down, without overlapping.
3. Decide who shoots first with a coin flip.
4. Players take turns calling one square, such as B7. The other player says “hit” or “miss”, and says when a ship is sunk.
5. The first player to sink the whole enemy fleet wins.

In the common modern set the fleet is a carrier (5 squares), battleship (4), cruiser (3), submarine (3) and destroyer (2), 17 squares in all. Older sets and paper versions sometimes use different ships.

Where Ships Can Fit

On an empty 10 by 10 grid, a ship of length L can sit in 2 × 10 × (11 − L) positions, counting both directions:

The shorter the ship, the more places it can hide, which is one reason the destroyer is often the hardest to find.

Which Squares Hold Ships Most Often?

If ships are placed at random, squares near the middle are covered far more often than corners, because more ship positions pass through them. In our simulation of 100,000 random fleets:

Real players do not place ships at random, and many avoid the middle, so treat this as a starting point, not a rule.

How Many Shots Does It Take?

We let a computer play 20,000 games against randomly placed fleets with three search methods:

• Random shots: calling squares at random needs almost the whole board.
• Hunt and target: shoot at random until you hit, then try the four squares around the hit until the ship is sunk.
• Checkerboard: while hunting, only shoot squares of one colour of a checkerboard. Every ship is at least 2 long, so it must cover one of them.

Better players go further, counting for every square how many remaining ship positions could still pass through it and shooting the highest count. That takes more thought, and we did not include it in the simulation above.

Placing Your Own Ships

• Do not always use the same pattern; good opponents remember.
• Avoid putting ships side by side: one hit can reveal both.
• Spread ships across the board rather than clustering them.
• To be truly unpredictable, use a random number generator to choose a row and column for each ship, and a coin flip for across or down.

Variations

• Salvo: fire one shot for each of your ships still afloat, and hear the results together.
• Small grid: an 8 by 8 grid with fewer ships for younger children.
• No ship called: say only “hit” or “miss”, never which ship, for a harder game.

Battleship grew out of older pencil-and-paper guessing games, and its exact origin is not recorded. If you like games where a little maths gives you an edge, try tic tac toe or Nim.

Another two-player classic with a clear best strategy is Connect Four, where the centre column is the key.

FAQ

How do you play Battleship?

Each player hides five ships on a 10 by 10 grid, then players take turns calling squares on the other grid. The other player says hit or miss, and the first to sink the whole fleet wins.

What is the best strategy in Battleship?

Hunt and target: shoot until you hit, then fire at the squares around the hit until the ship sinks. While hunting, only shoot one colour of a checkerboard. In our simulation this cut the average from 95 shots to about 61.

Where should you place ships in Battleship?

Spread them out, do not let them touch, and avoid always using the same pattern. A random number generator makes placement truly unpredictable.

How many squares do the ships cover in Battleship?

In the common modern set, 17: ships of 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2 squares.

What is the hardest ship to find in Battleship?

Often the smallest, the 2-square destroyer, because it can sit in more places than any other ship.