Battleship Strategy: A Good Strategy for Battleship, Step by Step

A good strategy for Battleship has two halves: a search method that wastes few shots, and a ship layout your opponent cannot predict. This page covers both. It assumes you know the basic rules; if not, read how to play Battleship first. The advice below is for the standard game on a 10 by 10 grid with five ships (carrier 5, battleship 4, cruiser 3, submarine 3, destroyer 2).

Battleship and Guess Who are trademarks of Hasbro. This page is an independent guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro.

The plan in one turn

1. Hunt. Fire parity shots (below), starting in the centre.
2. First hit. Shoot the four squares around it to find which way the ship lies.
3. Line found. Follow the line until you get a miss, then go back the other way.
4. Ship sunk. Cross it off your list of ships still afloat and return to hunting.
5. Late game. Spread your parity shots to match the smallest ship left.

Each of the steps is explained below.

Hunt mode: shoot by parity

Colour the grid in a checkerboard in your head and fire only at one colour while you are searching. Every ship is at least two squares long, so it must cover both colours. That halves the number of squares you need to check, from 100 to 50 in the worst case, and you will still find every ship.

Which colour you pick does not matter. Pick one and stay on it until you have a reason to change.

Start in the centre

Squares in the middle of the grid (roughly columns D to G, rows 4 to 7) can be covered by more possible ship positions than squares on the edge, and corners by the fewest. So start your parity shots in the middle and work outwards. That makes the first hit come sooner on average.

Target mode: after a hit

Switch from hunting to targeting as soon as you hit.

1. Fire at the four squares next to the hit, up, down, left and right. You are looking for a second hit, and colour no longer matters.
2. A second hit tells you the direction. Keep firing along that line until you get a miss.
3. Go back to the first hit and fire along the line the other way until you get a miss.
4. Finish the ship before you go back to hunting. When it sinks, you also learn its size.

If you end up with hits you cannot explain, they belong to a second ship. Mark them and come back after the first ship is down.

Use the misses

A miss is information. A cluster of misses can show an area where no ship fits: a pocket of four empty squares in a row cannot hold the carrier. Before each shot, look for the largest open area on your tracking grid and aim there.

Mark every shot, hit or miss, every time. Do not rely on memory.

Adjust as ships sink

Keep a tally of which of the enemy ships are still afloat. The smallest one left sets how far apart your parity shots can be.

Smallest ship left	Shoot every
Destroyer (2)	2nd square (checkerboard)
Submarine or cruiser (3)	3rd square
Battleship (4)	4th square
Carrier (5)	5th square

For example, if the destroyer and both 3-length ships are gone, only the battleship (4) and carrier (5) remain, so you can fire on a grid with gaps of three squares and still be sure to hit them.

Placing your own ships

Hunting well is half the game. The other half is hiding.

• Do not always hug the edges, and do not always sit in the middle. Mix both, so your opponent cannot guess.
• Change layouts between games. If you always open at C5 or always put the carrier in row 1, a friend will notice.
• Mix directions. A fleet that is all horizontal is easier to guess.
• Keep some space or touch some ships, but vary it. Advice differs. Spacing ships apart means a miss next to one does not lead the searcher to two. Touching them means a hit does not tell the searcher which ship it belongs to. Use both in different games.
• Learn how your opponent searches. If they fire at the edges first, do not put your destroyer there.

Reading an opponent

Players tend to open in the same place every game. Note where they open and which squares they check first, then put your small ships there next time.

Variations that change the strategy

• Salvo. You fire as many shots per turn as you have ships left.
• Ships cannot touch. This makes placement more careful and hunting simpler.
• Different fleet. The 2002 Hasbro version replaces the cruiser with a 3-square destroyer and adds a 2-square patrol boat. Count your ships before you fix your parity spacing.

Practise on screen

Battleship War Multiplayer has a mode against the computer, so you can try parity and target mode. It has no same-device two-player mode. Its two-player button opens a nickname box and is for online play. Note that this version is not the standard game. Its target grid is 14 by 14, and you place six ships, so your spacing will differ.

• Classic: click a cell to guess where an enemy ship is.
• Advanced: you collect points and spend them on power-ups. An airstrike hits several random cells at once, and radar reveals the position of an enemy ship.

If you like guessing games, Guess Who Multiplayer has a computer mode and an online mode. For other pen-and-paper games, see games to play with friends without anything.