Naval Combat Games

In Battleship games you place your ships on a grid, and your opponent does the same where you can't see. You take turns firing blind by calling a square, and whoever sinks all the other's ships first wins. It's a small section, with about 13 games.

How to play

First you place your fleet: ships of different sizes, horizontal or vertical, and each game has its own placement rules. Then you shoot by coordinates, like B7, and the game answers with miss, hit or sunk. On the classic board, which almost every game uses, the grid is 10x10, with letters along one side and numbers along the other. In many games, if you land a hit, you go again, though that depends on each version's rules.

Usually you play with the mouse or a finger: drag the ships to place them and click a square to fire. Hundir la flota (the Spanish name of Battleship), Battle Ship, Battleship and Naval Battleship follow that traditional formula. Turn Based Ship War, as its name says, is turn-based.

In the classic commercial version the fleet is five ships: carrier (5 squares), battleship (4), cruiser (3), submarine (3) and destroyer (2). There are variants with other sizes, and in some rule sets ships can touch while in others they can't. That changes a lot about where it makes sense to search.

Variants

Not all of them are the classic. Battleship War Multiplayer says you can play against other people. Battleships Armada, Battleships Pirates and Battleship the Beginning change the setting or add elements of their own. Intergalactic Battleships moves the battle to space. Others, like War Ship, Naval Battle or TRZ Battleship, may have their own rules, so always read the instructions.

Tips

• When placing your ships, avoid the corners and neat patterns: they're the first thing an opponent tries.
• Fire in a spaced-out checkerboard pattern (one square yes, one no) to find ships with fewer shots.
• When you hit a ship, fire at the four squares around it until it sinks, before you go back to searching.

There's some luck involved, but not that much: someone who plays with a method usually beats someone who fires at random.