Sea Battle

About Sea Battle

Hide your fleet and fire at the computer’s grid. Choose Easy, Normal or Hard, decide whether ships may touch and whether a hit earns another shot, then sink all five of its ships before it finds yours.

Sea Battle is the classic grid battleship game of hidden fleets. You and the computer each hide five ships on a 10×10 grid, then take turns calling out cells to fire at. Every shot is a hit or a miss, and the first player to sink the whole enemy fleet wins.

Also called: ship battle game, sink the fleet, naval battle game.

How to play Sea Battle

1. Place your fleet on Your waters: a Carrier (5 cells), a Cruiser (4), a Destroyer (3), a Submarine (3) and a Patrol boat (2). Drag a ship from the harbour onto the grid, or tap a ship and then a cell.
2. Tap a placed ship to turn it between across and down. Drag it to move it, or drag it off the grid to take it back. Random places the whole fleet for you and Clear empties the grid.
3. Pick the computer level and the two rule options, then press Start battle. You fire first.
4. Tap a cell in Enemy waters to fire at it. A white splash ring marks a miss and a cherry burst marks a hit. When every cell of a ship has been hit, the ship is sunk and its outline appears.
5. The computer fires back at your grid. Sink all five enemy ships before it sinks yours to win.

Rules

• Ships lie in straight lines, across or down, and never overlap. By default ships can’t touch, not even at the corners. Turn on Ships may touch to allow ships side by side.
• By default a hit passes the turn, just like a miss. Turn on A hit gives another shot and a player keeps firing until they miss.
• You can’t fire at the same cell twice. When a ship is sunk, both players are told which ship it was.
• When ships can’t touch, the cells around a sunk ship can’t hold another ship, so they get a small dot as a reminder.
• The computer places its fleet at random under the same rules, and it only knows what a player would know: where its own shots hit and missed.

Sea Battle tips and strategy

• Hunt on a checkerboard. Every ship covers at least two cells in a row, so firing only at cells of one colour of a checkerboard finds every ship in half the shots.
• After a hit, try the four cells around it. Once you have two hits in a line, keep going along that line until the ship sinks.
• The middle of the grid can hold a ship in more ways than the edges, so early shots near the centre are slightly more likely to hit.
• When the Patrol boat is sunk, the smallest ship left is 3 long, so you can space your hunting shots three cells apart.
• Hiding your own ships: the computer on Hard hunts the likeliest cells first, so ships along the edges and in the corners tend to survive longer.