Battleship Rules

Battleship is a two-player guessing game played on hidden grids — each player knows exactly where their own fleet is sitting and nothing at all about where the other player's is, which turns every called shot into a genuine piece of information gathering, not just an attack.

Setting up the grids

Each player has two grids, usually lettered A–J across and numbered 1–10 down: one tracks their own fleet, hidden from the opponent, and one tracks the shots they've fired at the opponent's grid. The classic home-set fleet is five ships — a five-space carrier, a four-space battleship, two three-space ships (a cruiser and a submarine), and a two-space destroyer — placed anywhere on the grid in a straight horizontal or vertical line, never diagonally, and never overlapping another ship or wrapping around the grid's edge.

Calling shots

Players alternate calling one coordinate per turn (for example, "E5"), and the opponent must truthfully report whether that coordinate is a "hit" or a "miss," marking the result on their own tracking grid to build a mental (or written) picture of where the enemy fleet must be. A hit doesn't reveal which ship was struck unless it's the final hit needed to sink it — at that point the firing player is told the ship is "sunk," and conventionally which one it was.

Winning

The game ends the moment one player has called hits on every space of every one of their opponent's ships — sinking the entire enemy fleet. There's no scoring beyond that single win condition; a game can run anywhere from a handful of lucky calls to nearly the full grid, depending entirely on how well each player reads the pattern of hits and misses that accumulates.

Reading the board: search patterns and denial placement

Because a ship occupies a straight run of adjacent squares, most players search in a checkerboard pattern rather than calling every square in sequence — since no ship shorter than two spaces exists, a diagonal checkerboard search guarantees eventually clipping every ship without wasting calls on squares that couldn't be adjacent to two others in a run. Once a hit lands, the follow-up calls typically probe the four neighboring squares to find the ship's orientation before finishing it off. On the placement side, spreading ships apart rather than clustering them, and avoiding the grid's exact center or edges (both are common first-guess targets), are the two most reliable defensive habits.

Variants: Salvo, hidden-grid apps, and larger fleets

A well-known variant called "Salvo" changes the turn structure entirely: instead of one shot per turn, each player fires a number of shots per turn equal to how many ships they still have afloat, all called at once before any results are revealed — which removes the back-and-forth information trickle of standard play and makes a whole turn's worth of guesses commit at the same time. Larger custom fleets (adding a second destroyer, or a longer flagship) are common house adjustments on bigger grids, and digital and app versions of the game generally keep the same core rules while automating the bookkeeping of two separate grids per player.

Origins: from wartime paper game to a licensed board game

Battleship's documented history starts as a pencil-and-paper game, likely dating to World War I under names like "Salvo," played on graph paper with no manufactured components at all — exactly the kind of folk game that spreads without a fixed inventor or publication date. Milton Bradley released the first widely sold plastic board version, with the familiar peg-and-grid trays, in 1967, which is the form most people picture when they hear the name today, even though the underlying guessing-game mechanic predates that specific product by decades.

The arguments this game actually produces

Players new to the game often assume a hit's ship identity should be announced immediately — it isn't. Opponents learn which ship was hit only at the moment of the sinking blow, not on every partial hit along the way, which is what keeps a partly-damaged ship's exact length and orientation genuinely hidden until it's gone.

Questions that come up mid-game

Can ships be placed touching each other, edge to edge? Yes, in the standard rules — there's no requirement to leave a gap between ships, though some house variants add that restriction to make placement (and searching) noticeably harder.

If a called coordinate has already been fired at earlier in the game, is the second call wasted? Most tables simply disallow repeating a coordinate once it's been called, since the result is already known; if a player calls one anyway by mistake, the usual fix is just to let them call a fresh coordinate instead without penalty.

Does the player who goes first get any real advantage? A small one — going first means one extra call over the course of a long game, but it rarely decides a close match on its own.