Battleship the Game vs. Battleship the Puzzle: What Changes

Battleship the game and Battleship the puzzle share a theme and almost nothing else. The game is for two players: each hides a fleet on a grid, and you take turns calling out squares to find the other's ships, so luck decides a good part of it. The puzzle, Battleship solitaire, is for one person: numbers beside every row and column tell you how many ship squares each line holds, and you work out the whole fleet by logic, with no guessing at all.

This post is for anyone who grew up with the board game and wonders what the puzzle version is, or who plays the puzzle and is curious about the game behind it. It covers the history of both, how each is played, where the luck is in the game, and why the puzzle has none. For the puzzle's rules in full, see how to play Battleship solitaire.

Battleship the game: from paper grids to plastic pegs

Battleship began as a pencil-and-paper game, long before it was a boxed toy. The Strong National Museum of Play, which inducted Battleship into its National Toy Hall of Fame in 2025, traces its roots to the earliest manufactured war games (The Strong: Battleship, National Toy Hall of Fame):

The museum says the Milton Bradley game has sold more than 100 million copies since its debut. Played on paper, the game had other names in other countries: Schiffe versenken in German, zeeslag in Dutch, batalla naval in Spanish (Wikipedia (German): Schiffe versenken). Those names come back later, because the puzzle borrowed them.

How the two-player game works

In the board game Battleship, each player secretly places a fleet on a 10x10 grid, and the players take turns firing one shot at a square of the other's grid, named by a letter and a number. Hasbro's current rules give each player five ships: a carrier of 5 squares, a battleship of 4, a destroyer of 3, a submarine of 3 and a patrol boat of 2 (Hasbro: Battleship instructions, 2022). That is 17 ship squares among 100.

A turn goes like this:

1. You call a square, for example D-4.
2. Your opponent checks their own grid and answers "miss", or "hit" and which ship you hit.
3. You mark the shot on your target grid: a white or green peg for a miss, a red peg for a hit.
4. When every square of a ship has been hit, its owner announces that it has been sunk.

The first player to sink the whole enemy fleet wins. Hasbro's rules also include a Salvo game for experienced players, in which you fire as many shots per turn as you have ships still afloat.

Two details matter for the comparison. Ships are placed horizontally or vertically, never diagonally, just as in the puzzle. But nothing in Hasbro's rules says ships may not touch, and some players line ships up side by side to confuse the opponent (DataGenetics: Battleship). Some paper traditions do keep ships apart; Dutch Wikipedia's (uncited) description of zeeslag says the boats never touch (Wikipedia (Dutch): Zeeslag)).

Where the luck is in the game

The board game Battleship mixes skill and luck, and the luck sits in the first shots: with no information, any square is as good as another. Skill lies in what you do after a hit, and in searching cleverly between hits.

The clearest numbers come from a 2011 analysis by Nick Berry on his DataGenetics blog, which played 100 million simulated games on a 10x10 grid with ships of 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2 squares (DataGenetics: Battleship):

The best strategy is a big improvement: no game took longer than 73 shots. But at the median that is still 25 misses for 17 hits, and Berry found a perfect game, 17 shots and 17 hits, came up only about once in a million. However clever you are, the game makes you guess.

The checkerboard idea is worth knowing. Every ship is at least two squares long, so every ship covers at least one dark square of a checkerboard pattern. So you only need to search half the squares to find every ship, and you switch to the squares around a hit once you get one.

Battleship the puzzle: the answers given up front

Battleship the puzzle takes away the opponent and gives you, before you start, the information the opponent would only have handed out shot by shot. Instead of "hit" or "miss" for one square, you are told how many ship squares lie in every row and every column. You also know the fleet exactly. The puzzle was invented in Argentina in 1982 under the name Batalla Naval (Conceptis: Battleships history); the story of how it spread, and why it is also called Bimaru and Yubotu, is in one puzzle, many names.

The puzzle adds one rule the game does not have: ships never touch, not even diagonally. That rule is what makes the logic work. Every ship square you find tells you that its four diagonal neighbours are water, and every finished ship comes with a ring of water around it. Without it, a run of hits could be one long ship or two short ones lying end to end, and the counts could not tell them apart.

The puzzle's fleet is also different. The classic puzzle hides ten ships on a 10x10 grid: one battleship of 4, two cruisers of 3, three destroyers of 2 and four submarines of 1 (Conceptis: Battleships rules). There is no five-square carrier, and there are single-square submarines, which the game does not have.

The game and the puzzle, side by side

Battleship the game and Battleship the puzzle differ in nearly every way that matters to how they feel to play:

How the puzzle turns luck into logic

Battleship solitaire replaces every guess with a deduction, and a tiny example shows how. Here is a 5x5 mini puzzle, smaller than any real level, with a fleet of one ship of 3, one of 2 and two of 1. Columns are A to E, rows 1 to 5.

					0
					4
					0
					2
					1
3	0	1	1	2	·

In the board game, your first shot here would be a guess. In the puzzle, you never fire blind:

1. Rows 1 and 3 and column B are 0. Those 13 squares are water.
2. Row 2 needs 4, and with B2 water it has exactly four open squares: A2, C2, D2 and E2. All are ship.
3. A2 has water on every side (B2, and rows 1 and 3), so it is a single-square ship. C2, D2 and E2 run from the water at B2 to the edge: the ship of 3.
4. Columns C and D need 1 each, and C2 and D2 supply it, so C4, C5, D4 and D5 are water.
5. Column A needs 3. It has A2, and the only open squares left are A4 and A5, so both are ship: the ship of 2, standing upright.
6. Row 5 needs 1, and A5 is it, so E5 is water. Row 4 needs 2: A4, and the only other open square, E4. That is the last single-square ship.

					0
					4
					0
					2
					1
3	0	1	1	2	·

Twenty-five squares decided, seven of them ship, and no misses. In the game, finding seven ship squares among 25 would cost you a handful of wasted shots however you searched.

There is a neat link between the two. The best game strategy above counts how many ways each remaining ship could still fit over every square, then fires at the likeliest. Battleship solitaire players do the same counting when they ask where the biggest ship can still go, and the counts in the puzzle often narrow the answer to exactly one place. The strategy guide calls this placing the big ship first.

Why the puzzle suits one player

Battleship solitaire works well alone for the same reasons a crossword or a sudoku does: it is complete in itself, you can stop and come back, and you know for certain when you are done.

• No partner needed. The counts are your opponent, and they never cheat or get bored.
• No luck. A well-made puzzle has exactly one solution, so a slow solve is never bad luck, and a fast one is never a fluke. There is more on this idea in what "logic-only" really means.
• Mistakes are free to fix. A wrong mark costs you nothing but the moment it takes to change it.
• It scales. A 6x6 grid with six ships is a short warm-up; a 10x10 grid with the full fleet takes real concentration.

If you miss the two-player side, you can get some of it back. In Puzzle Picnic you can challenge a friend: you share a link to the exact same puzzle with your time, and they play it whenever they like and try to beat it. It is a race, but a fair one, because you both solve the same grid. More ideas are in puzzles with friends.

Frequently asked questions

Is Battleship solitaire the same as Battleship?

No. Battleship is a two-player guessing game. Battleship solitaire is a one-player logic puzzle that borrows the theme: you get row and column counts and the fleet list, and you work out every ship without guessing.

Can you play Battleship by yourself?

Not the board game as written: it needs someone to hide the ships and answer your shots. Battleship solitaire is the one-player version, and it is a logic puzzle rather than a guessing game.

Can ships touch in Battleship?

In Hasbro's board game rules, nothing forbids it; ships just may not be placed diagonally. In Battleship solitaire, ships never touch, not even at a corner, and that rule is central to solving the puzzle.

Who invented Battleship?

No single inventor is known for the paper game; Russian officers reportedly played a similar game during World War I. Salvo (1931) was an early boxed version with printed grids, and Milton Bradley's plastic Battleship came out in 1967. The puzzle version was invented in Argentina in 1982.

What is the best strategy for the Battleship board game?

In Nick Berry's 2011 simulations, a probability strategy did best, with a median of 42 shots: before each shot, count how many ways the remaining ships could cover each square, and fire at the square with the most. A simpler checkerboard search, followed by the squares around each hit, came second.

Where to go next

If the mini puzzle above made sense, you are ready for a real one. How to play Battleship solitaire solves a full 6x6 grid move by move, and the strategy guide works through an 8x8 with a battleship in it. Everything else on the puzzle is on the Ships topic page.

To try it, the Ships page on Puzzle Picnic has the rules and a Play button, from a 6x6 Easy grid up to the classic 10x10 fleet.

Sources

• The Strong National Museum of Play: Battleship, National Toy Hall of Fame
• Hasbro: Battleship instructions (F4527), 2022
• DataGenetics (Nick Berry): Battleship, 2011
• Conceptis: Battleships history
• Conceptis: Battleships rules
• Wikipedia (German): Schiffe versenken
• Wikipedia (Dutch): Zeeslag)