Sea Battle · Rules & strategy

The fleet and the sea

The sea has 100 squares, columns A–J and rows 1–10. Your fleet is a carrier (5), heavy cruiser (4), cruiser (3), submarine (3) and patrol boat (2). Ships lie straight, horizontally or vertically, and may not overlap. The left board is your fleet and the right board is the enemy sea (on a narrow phone, switch boards with the button at the top).

Placing ships

Both players place their fleets at the same time. Tap a ship in the list at the bottom, then tap a square of your sea: the ship is placed with its bow there. ↻ turns it, tapping a placed ship picks it up again, and “Random” scatters the whole fleet for you. Press “Ready” once all five are placed.

Firing

When both fleets are ready, players take turns firing at one square of the enemy sea, starting with the first player. A hit shows a burning red peg, a miss a white peg. When all squares of a ship are hit, it is announced as sunk and its position is revealed to both players.

Option: touching ships

With touching allowed, ships may lie side by side. With keep apart, ships may not be neighbours, not even diagonally — so the water around a sunk ship is known to be empty, which makes deduction easier.

Option: firing mode and winning

In one shot per turn, the turn passes after every shot. With fire again on a hit, you keep shooting as long as you hit, which makes games faster and swingier. The first player to sink all five enemy ships wins, and at the end every remaining ship is revealed.

Search in a checkerboard

The smallest ship covers two squares, so firing at alternate squares like a checkerboard is guaranteed to hit every ship. You search with only half the shots, far faster than firing at random. Once the small ships are gone you can spread your shots even wider.

After a hit, finish the job

After a hit, try the four neighbours; once a second hit shows the direction, work along that line to both ends. Don’t wander off before the “sunk” message. When ships may touch, a line of hits might belong to two different ships.

Think in probabilities

Count where the remaining ships could still fit: narrow gaps between misses or along the edge cannot hold a big ship, while the open middle of the sea is crossed by many possible positions. Shooting where the most placements overlap is exactly how the Hard AI plays.

Placement tips

Ships all hugging the edge or clustered together are easy to read. Mix horizontal and vertical ships and leave a little space between them, so that finding one ship doesn’t reveal its neighbour. Easy AI fires almost at random, Normal searches in a checkerboard and follows hits, and Hard uses a full probability map.

FAQ