🚢 Battleship online — sink the enemy fleet

The pencil-and-paper classic, minus the paper

Long before the plastic boxed edition reached American toy stores in 1967, Battleship was a pencil-and-paper game: two 10×10 grids on graph paper, letters along one edge, numbers along the other, and coordinates called out across the table. Because it spread hand to hand, rules vary by country. We use the classic paper rules still common in Eastern Europe, which play noticeably differently from the boxed game.

Our fleet vs the boxed game

If you grew up with the Hasbro board game, three things will feel new: more ships, smaller ships and the extra-shot rule.

The four single-cell ships are what makes this version tense: you can sink almost everything and still burn a dozen shots hunting the last one.

How a game works

1. Two players, two 10×10 seas: columns A–J, rows 1–10. You see your own ships and where the enemy fired; on the enemy sea you only see your own hits and misses.
2. Both fleets are placed automatically, and legally, at the start of every game.
3. A coin flip decides who fires first. Tap a cell on the enemy sea to shoot.
4. Miss and the turn passes. Hit and you fire again, for as long as you keep hitting.
5. When a ship sinks, the ring of cells around it is marked empty for you.
6. Each shot has a 45-second clock. Let it run out and the game fires a random shot for you.
7. Sink all 20 enemy cells to win.

For the full rules and shooting tactics, read our Battleship for two guide.

Play Battleship online with friends, free

Create a Battleship room and text your friend the link or the four-character room code (letters and digits). They open it on a phone or laptop, type a nickname and they’re in — no account, no app, no download. Once two players are in the lobby, the host starts the battle. A game takes about ten minutes.

• Strictly two players. The room holds exactly two: two people, or you and a bot.
• The bot. The host adds it from the lobby. It fires at random until it scores a hit, then works the neighboring cells until that ship goes down.
• Scoreboard. Above the grids, both players see which ships are still afloat (by size), how many are untouched and the win count for this room.
• Rematch. The host starts the next game with fresh random fleets; wins keep adding up, so a best-of-five is easy.
• Ranked. Battleship is Elo-rated with a public leaderboard. Beating the bot counts too, at half the weight of beating a person.
• Dropped connection. Reopen the page and the game picks up where it was — but the shot clock keeps running.

More than two of you? Run a tournament: a 3–8 player bracket with byes for odd numbers and final standings. Want a different duel? Try chess or a quick tic-tac-toe series.

Settings and house rules

Battleship has no lobby options: everyone plays the same rules, which keeps the rating fair. So there is no Salvo mode (several shots per turn), no manual placement, no touching ships and no one-shot-per-turn variant.

Strategy that actually works

• Shoot a lattice, not rows. While the 4-cell ship is alive, fire along every fourth diagonal; it can’t hide between those lines. Watch the scoreboard and tighten the spacing as big ships sink, down to a checkerboard when only small ones remain.
• Diagonals of a hit are always empty. Ships are straight and never touch at corners, so the four diagonal neighbors of any hit can’t hold a ship. Skip them.
• Finish what you start. After a hit, try the four sides; after a second hit, shoot only along that line, in both directions.
• Count the gaps. Late in the game a 3- or 4-cell ship only fits in long open runs; narrow pockets can hold only small ships.
• Beat the clock yourself. A random auto-shot wastes your turn far more often than a planned one.