How to Play Warship: Rules, Fleet Placement and How to Sink Every Battleship

The grid and your fleet

The grid has ten rows and ten columns, 100 squares in all. Each player secretly places a fleet of five ships, and each ship covers a straight line of squares.

• Carrier: 5 squares
• Battleship: 4 squares
• Cruiser: 3 squares
• Submarine: 3 squares
• Destroyer: 2 squares

Ships can be placed across or down, they cannot overlap, and they can sit right next to each other. On boardflix the Direction button turns the ship you are placing, Randomize places the whole fleet for you and Clear lets you start again.

How a turn works

1. Pick a square on the enemy grid and fire at it.
2. You are told whether it is a hit or a miss. A miss makes a splash and a hit makes an explosion.
3. When every square of a ship has been hit, that ship is sunk and you are told which one.
4. The turn passes to your opponent, who fires at your grid.

How to score a point and win

A ship only counts when it is sunk, so you need to hit the target battleship completely, all four squares, to score a point against it. In the same way a destroyer needs two hits and a carrier needs five. The first player to sink all five ships of the enemy fleet wins the game.

Placing your fleet

Good placement is about being unpredictable. Beginners push ships against the edges or leave them in neat rows, and opponents learn to look there first. Mix up your layout: put some ships near the middle, keep others apart and do not use the same pattern every game.

Ships that touch each other can confuse a hunting opponent, because a line of hits may belong to two ships. This is a good way to waste their shots.

How to find ships quickly

Because the smallest ship covers two squares, you never need to fire at every square. Shoot at every second square in a checkerboard pattern until you get a hit, and your shots cover the whole grid twice as fast.

When you get a hit, switch to hunting. Fire at the four squares around the hit until you find which way the ship runs, and then follow the line until the ship is sunk. Do not wander off to another part of the grid with a ship half hit.

Keep track of which ships are still afloat. Once the destroyer and the submarine are gone, any gap of fewer than three squares cannot hold a ship, and you can skip it. A run of five hits in a line has to be the carrier. Shots decide the game, so every shot you save is a turn you gain.

Common mistakes

• Firing at random squares instead of a pattern.
• Giving up on a hit before the ship is sunk.
• Always hiding ships on the edge.
• Forgetting to use which ships are left to cut down the search.

Playing Warship on boardflix

You can play the computer on Easy, Medium or Hard. In our tests Hard needs about 45 shots on average to sink a whole fleet, Medium about 55 and Easy about 95. To play a friend, create a private room and share the link. Each fleet stays hidden on the server, so nobody can peek. Every shot has its own sound: a plop for a miss, a hit for a strike and a boom when a ship goes down.

Frequently asked questions