Naval Battle

The classic find-the-ships game, now against a computer that plays for real

Naval Battle started as a pencil-and-paper game, long before it became a boxed board game: two players draw two 10 by 10 grids, hide their own fleet on one of them and spend the whole game trying to find where the other player's ships are. Every square has a name, a letter for the column and a number for the row, like B7. Each turn you call a square, your opponent answers miss, hit or sunk, and whoever sinks the other fleet first wins. Here you play the computer, which never sees where your ships are and decides only from what the game itself reveals. There are two fleets. The classic one has five ships (a carrier of 5 squares, a battleship of 4, a cruiser of 3, a submarine of 3 and a destroyer of 2), the same table as the 1990 Milton Bradley rules. The paper fleet has ten ships (one of 5 squares, two of 4, three of 3 and four of 2), the pen-and-grid version described in encyclopedias, which makes for longer games. Rules that vary from table to table became options: whether ships may touch, the salvo (as many shots per turn as you have ships left) and an extra shot for a hit. The computer plays at three honest levels: random simply picks squares, the hunter searches in a checkerboard and chases its hits, and the strategist works out every position each surviving ship could still occupy and fires at the likeliest square. We measured each one over thousands of simulated games, and the numbers are shown when you choose.

Build your fleet, then fire at the enemy sea

1. Choose the fleet, the difficulty and the rules, then tap Place your fleet.
2. Drag each ship into your sea (or tap the ship and then a square). Tap the selected ship again, or press R, to rotate it. The Random button places everything at once and you can adjust by hand.
3. Tap a square in the enemy sea to fire. Red is a hit, a white dot is a miss. The green ring marks the last shot. Sink all of its ships before it sinks yours.

Sources and references for this tool

These references help contextualize formulas, standards, APIs and limitations used on this page. They do not replace professional validation when a result has legal, financial, medical or operational impact.

• Battleship (game)Wikipedia, Classic fleet (carrier 5, battleship 4, cruiser 3, submarine 3, destroyer 2, 1990 Milton Bradley rules) and the salvo variant.
• Batalha naval (jogo)Wikipédia, 10x10 grid and the paper variant with ships of 5, 4, 3 and 2 squares in quantities 1, 2, 3 and 4.
• Schiffe versenkenWikipedia (de), Details the paper fleet (1x5, 2x4, 3x3, 4x2), the optional no-touching rule and the salvo.

Frequently asked questions

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