Battleship: basic rules and a strategy that is not luck

The rules you need at a table and on a screen

Each player hides a fleet on a grid. In turn you name a cell. Miss, or hit. A ship is sunk when every one of its cells has been hit. The winner is the first to sink the whole opposing fleet. Variants change grid size and the ship list: agree the set before you start. In Sea War the set is the one in the app: do not invent extra ships by voice.

Ships do not overlap and, in many variants, they do not touch. If you play “they may touch”, say so first. Diagonal placement is usually forbidden: ships sit in a row or a column. Those three sentences prevent three quarters of the arguments.

Placing the fleet

Do not pile everything in a corner and do not line every ship on the edge “because nobody looks there”. A practised opponent looks first for common patterns: edges, clusters, symmetry. Spread different lengths across different zones. Leave real water between ships if the rules ask for it: it protects you from comb shots that start from a hit in the middle.

Two phases: hunt and target

In the hunt, do not shoot at random or in the next cell. Use a lattice (every two or three cells, depending on the shortest ship left). When you hit, switch to targeting: the four orthogonal directions, one at a time, until you have the line of the ship. Do not go back to hunting until that ship is sunk, or you leave holes you will forget.

Radar in Sea War is a reading aid, not a substitute for memory. Mark (or look at the grid for) shots already taken. The CPU does not cheat: it plays its heuristic. Against a friend, the edge belongs to whoever wastes fewer misses after the first hit, not whoever guesses the first cell.

Mistakes that stretch the match

Repeating a cell already called. Targeting on a diagonal. Leaving a hit ship to “try elsewhere”. Clustering all the short ships, so one comb takes them all. Sea War opens in the browser, against the computer or a rival, with no download: the game page on the portal explains controls and modes. This guide still holds if you play with paper and a marker.