How to Play Battleship: Rules, Ship Placement and Winning Strategy

Battleship is a guessing game for two players. Each of you hides a fleet on a grid, then you take turns calling shots and try to find and sink the other fleet first. It works on paper, with the classic plastic board game, or on a screen, and it is one of the best games to play with a friend. This guide gives the standard rules, how to place your ships, and a search method that finds ships faster than random guessing.

What you need

• Two 10 by 10 grids per player: one for your own fleet, one to track your shots at the enemy. Columns are lettered A to J, rows are numbered 1 to 10.
• A fleet of five ships, each taking up a straight line of squares:

Ship	Length
Carrier	5
Battleship	4
Cruiser	3
Submarine	3
Destroyer	2

The total is 17 squares of ship on a grid of 100.

Setup

1. Place your five ships on your own grid, horizontally or vertically. Not diagonally.
2. Ships cannot overlap and must stay inside the grid. In the standard rules ships may touch each other.
3. Do not let your opponent see your grid.

How a turn works

1. On your turn, call out one square, for example "B7".
2. Your opponent checks their grid and answers "hit" or "miss". If your shot completes a ship, they must say which ship you sank ("You sank my cruiser").
3. Mark the result on your tracking grid, usually with a red mark for a hit and a white mark for a miss.
4. Your opponent then takes their turn.

How you win

The first player to sink all five of the other player's ships wins. A ship is sunk when every one of its squares has been hit.

Placing your fleet

Good placement matters because your opponent is also looking for patterns.

• Do not always hug the edges. Many players hide ships on the border. Experienced opponents search there first.
• Do not always hide in the middle either. A mix of positions is harder to predict.
• Place ships so that they touch each other in places. When a searcher gets a hit, it is not obvious whether the neighbouring square belongs to the same ship.
• Change your layout from game to game. If you always put the destroyer in the same corner, a friend will notice.
• Mix directions. A fleet that is all horizontal is easier to guess than one with ships both ways.

Finding ships faster: the checkerboard search

The smallest ship is two squares long. That means you never need to shoot every square to find a ship. Imagine a checkerboard over the grid and fire only at one colour, for example squares where the column number plus the row number is odd, counting A as 1 (A2, B1, B3 and so on). Any ship of length two or more must cover at least one square of each colour, so it cannot hide from you. This halves the number of squares you need to search.

Once the smaller ships are sunk, you can spread your shots further apart. If only the carrier (5) and battleship (4) are left, you can search with gaps of three or four squares.

After a hit: finishing the ship

When you get a hit, switch from searching to hunting.

1. Shoot the four squares next to the hit (up, down, left, right) until you get a second hit.
2. Once you have two hits in a line, you know the direction. Keep going along that line until you get misses at both ends or the ship is sunk.
3. If the line stops but the ship is not sunk, check the other end. The ship may be longer than you thought, or another ship may be touching it.
4. When a ship is sunk, any hits left over that are not part of it belong to a different ship. Hunt around those next.

Reading your opponent

• Players often start in the same place every game. Notice where your opponent opens and where they put their first ship.
• After a miss, avoid the squares next to it if the unsunk ships are large. Small ships only fit near it.
• Keep a list of which ships are still afloat. It tells you the longest line you still need to find.

Variations

• Salvo. Each turn, you fire as many shots as you have ships still afloat. As you lose ships, your shots shrink.
• One shot per turn, but a hit gives you another go. Speeds the game up.
• Smaller grid. Use an 8 by 8 grid with fewer ships for a shorter game with children.
• No touching. Ships cannot touch, even at corners. Makes hunting simpler and placement more careful.
• Pen and paper. All you need is two sheets of squared paper. Draw the grids by hand.

Play it online

If you want to play without drawing grids, you can find free online Battleship-style games in the Board and Card games category. Battleship War Multiplayer is one to look at. Check its page for the modes it offers. For other pen-and-paper classics, see how to play dots and boxes, how to play hangman and the best board games for 2 players.

Battleship is a trademark of Hasbro. This page is an independent guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro.