Battleship is the only game I know where two people can sit in total silence for ten minutes, say nothing but coordinates, and still end up shouting. It survived from a pencil-and-paper game played in the trenches of the First World War to a plastic box on every childhood shelf to, now, a tab you can open in about two seconds. The rules never needed updating. They were already perfect.
What most people never learn is that Battleship is not a luck game. It feels like one, because you start with no information. But after your third or fourth hit, the board stops being random and starts being a logic puzzle — and the people who win consistently are the ones who noticed that. You can play Battleship free right here — on 360 PlayZone you play the computer, or a friend on the same device by passing it between turns; there is no online room — and this guide is about the part nobody teaches you.
How to play Battleship (the rules in six steps)
- Each player takes a 10×10 grid and hides five ships: Carrier (5 squares), Battleship (4), Cruiser (3), Submarine (3), Destroyer (2).
- Place every ship horizontally or vertically, never diagonally and never overlapping another ship.
- Take turns calling one coordinate on the opponent's grid, such as B5.
- The opponent answers "hit" or "miss", and both players mark the result on their grids.
- When every square of a ship has been hit, its owner announces which ship sank.
- The first player to sink all five enemy ships wins.
Each player hides five ships on a 10x10 grid: a Carrier (5 squares), a Battleship (4), a Cruiser (3), a Submarine (3) and a Destroyer (2). Ships sit horizontally or vertically, never diagonally, and never overlapping. Then you take turns calling a square. "Miss" or "hit." When every square of a ship is hit, it sinks and its owner has to say so out loud. Sink all five and you win.
That is the entire game. The two rules people argue about most: ships can touch each other unless you agree otherwise beforehand, and you announce which ship sank, not just that one did. Agree on both before the first shot and you save yourself a fight in the middle.
What is the best Battleship strategy?
The best Battleship strategy is to fire in a checkerboard (parity) pattern while hunting, because every ship is at least two squares long and must cover one of those squares, then switch to targeting the four neighbours of any hit until the ship sinks. It cuts an average game from about 60 shots to 40.
Stop firing randomly — fire on a parity
Here is the single biggest improvement available to you, and it costs nothing. Your smallest ship is two squares long. That means every ship on the board must cover at least one square of a checkerboard pattern. Picture the grid coloured like a chessboard: if you only ever fire at the dark squares, you cannot possibly miss a ship entirely. There is nowhere for a two-square ship to hide that touches no dark square.
So in the searching phase, only shoot dark squares. You have just halved the board — 50 candidate squares instead of 100 — without giving up a single thing. Most players discover this on their own after a hundred games. You get it for free in the next paragraph's worth of reading.
Hunt, then target
Good Battleship play is two modes, and you switch between them the instant something changes.
Hunt mode is what you do when you have no live leads: fire on the parity pattern, spread out, and — this matters — favour the middle of the board. Not superstition, geometry. A five-square Carrier has far more ways to sit across the centre than jammed along an edge, so the centre squares are genuinely more likely to be occupied. Corners are the last place worth looking.
Target mode starts the moment you hit something. Now stop wandering and work the wound: shoot the four squares adjacent to the hit — up, down, left, right. When you land a second hit, you have an axis. Now you know the ship's orientation, so extend along that line in both directions until you get a miss at each end or the thing sinks. Do not drift back to random shots while a ship is bleeding. Finish it, then go back to hunting.
Hide your ships like an adult
Placement is where most games are quietly lost before a shot is fired. Three habits worth breaking:
Stop hugging the edges. Everyone's first instinct is to shove ships against the border because it feels sneaky. It is the opposite — experienced opponents sweep edges early precisely because beginners load them up.
Stop parking them in a neat row. Once your opponent finds one ship, an adjacent second ship gets found for free by their follow-up shots. Spread out.
Do mix orientations. If all five of your ships run vertically, then the moment somebody gets two hits in a column they know the orientation of everything else you own. Two vertical, three horizontal, scattered.
One genuinely good trick: put the little two-square Destroyer somewhere obnoxious and isolated, in dead space your opponent will sweep last. It is the hardest ship to find and it will often be the thing that keeps you alive at the end.
Playing 2 player Battleship without a board
The two-player version is the real game — an AI does not sigh when you find its Carrier. Our Battleship game runs pass-and-play on one screen, so two people share a laptop or a phone and hand it over between turns. No app, no install, no account, and nothing to set up beyond deciding who places first. It works the same on a school Chromebook as it does on a desktop, which is the entire point of a browser game.
If you like that format — one device, two humans, no download — it is worth knowing the site has a whole 2 player games shelf built the same way. Dots and Boxes is the other great pencil-and-paper survivor and hides a surprisingly deep chain-counting strategy under a childish surface. Connect Four is the fastest game to learn and the hardest to stop playing. Checkers and Gomoku are there when you want something slower and meaner.
When you want the noisy version
Battleship's charm is its patience. Some days you do not want patience, you want to point at a thing and destroy it immediately. Artillery Duel is Battleship with the grid removed and physics added — angle, power, wind, direct hit. Tank Arena skips the turn-taking entirely. Dice Duel is what you play when neither of you wants to think at all.
And if you found this because you are meant to be doing something else right now, the games to play when bored in class list was assembled with exactly your situation in mind. For the wider two-player tour, start with the best 2 player games; for the slow, thoughtful end of the shelf, chess and board games online.
Now go and stop shooting at the corners.