Battleship Strategy: How to Win More Often

By the Iron Tide team · Last reviewed October 9, 2026

Battleship looks like pure luck, but the way you search the grid changes how many shots you need by more than half. We ran the numbers on four approaches so you can see what actually works.

What we tested

Using the same rules engine that runs this site, we played 65,000 simulated games on a standard 10×10 grid with the five-ship fleet placed at random, and counted how many shots each strategy needed to sink everything. Fewer is better; 100 is the worst possible.

Your opponent needs shots too, so the player who finishes in fewer shots wins. Moving from random firing to a checkerboard search saves about 40 shots a game. That is the difference between losing almost every time and winning most of the time.

1. Hunt, then target

Play in two modes. While you have no unsunk hits on the board, you are hunting: searching for a ship. The moment you get a hit, switch to targeting: fire at the squares directly above, below, left and right of the hit until the ship sinks, then go back to hunting. On its own this habit cut the average game from 95 shots to 62 in our tests.

Once you have two hits in a row, you know the ship’s direction. Keep firing along that line in both directions before trying anything else.

2. Search in a checkerboard

The smallest ship covers two squares, so every ship on the board must touch at least one square of each color on a checkerboard. That means you only ever need to hunt on half the grid. Pick one color and ignore the other until you get a hit. This took another seven shots off the average.

You can widen the pattern as ships go down. Once the two-square ship is sunk, the smallest remaining ship is three long, so hunting every third square along each diagonal is enough.

3. Think in probabilities

The strongest approach asks, for every open square, “how many ways could the remaining ships still fit across this square?” Squares in the middle of large open areas can hold a ship in many ways; squares boxed in by misses can hold very few. Fire at the square with the most possibilities.

You cannot count every arrangement in your head, but you can follow the instinct behind it:

• Early in the game, the center of the board is more likely to hold a ship than the corners.
• Shoot into the biggest unexplored gap, not next to your old misses.
• Check whether the remaining ships can even fit in a gap before spending a shot there.

This is how the Admiral-level computer opponent on this site plays. It averaged 44.5 shots in our test, and its best game took 22.

Where to place your own ships

• Do not make a pattern. People who always hug the edges, or never do, become predictable after a few games against the same opponent.
• Spread out, mostly. Touching ships can be found together: a player targeting around one hit may stumble into the next ship for free.
• But touching can also mislead. Two ships placed end to end look like one long ship, and an opponent may walk away thinking the job is done. It is a gamble that works best against experienced players.
• Protect the small ship. Games are often decided by who finds the two-square ship first. Put it somewhere unremarkable, not in a corner where people instinctively check.

Is Battleship a solved game?

Not in the way tic-tac-toe is. Both players have hidden information, so there is no fixed sequence of moves that always wins. What exists are very good search methods, like the probability approach above, and placement habits that avoid being predictable. Luck still decides individual games, which is a large part of why the game has lasted.

Try it

The quickest way to feel the difference is to play the computer at each level. The Ensign fires mostly at random, the Captain hunts and targets, and the Admiral plays the probabilities.

Common questions