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Battleships
online with a friend

Hunt your opponent's fleet across a 10×10 grid. Ships are placed automatically, so there's no fiddly setup — you're firing within seconds of sharing the link.

▶ Play BattleshipsFree · no signup · just share a link

How to play
  1. Each player gets a fleet of five ships, placed at random: Carrier (5 squares), Battleship (4), Cruiser (3), Submarine (3) and Destroyer (2) — 17 squares in total.
  2. Ships never touch each other, not even diagonally. There's always water between them.
  3. Take turns firing at squares on your opponent's grid. You'll see your own fleet below, so you can watch the damage coming in.
  4. A hit lets you fire again. A miss passes the turn. Sink every enemy ship to win.

Strategy & tips
  • Hunt in a checkerboard pattern. The smallest ship is two squares long, so firing at every second square makes it impossible to miss a ship entirely — you halve your search without losing any coverage.
  • After a hit, probe the neighbours. Try the four squares around it to work out whether the ship lies horizontally or vertically, then follow that line to the end.
  • Use the no-touching rule. Because ships never touch, everything around a sunk ship is guaranteed water — this game marks it for you automatically, so read those clues instead of wasting shots.
  • Hits snowball. Since a hit earns another shot, a good run can end the game quickly. Aim at wide, unexplored areas rather than nibbling at the edges of what you already know.

Where it comes from

Battleships began as a pencil-and-paper game played by soldiers during the First World War, long before Milton Bradley boxed it in plastic in 1967. The 5-4-3-3-2 fleet on a 10×10 grid — 17 squares out of 100 — is the standard for good reason: it's dense enough to find by luck, sparse enough that method beats luck.