How to play
Sea Battle is the pencil-and-paper naval game that Turkish players call Amiral Battı (“the admiral has sunk”). You and the computer each hide a fleet on a 10 × 10 patch of sea, then take turns calling shots into the other side’s water. Whoever sinks every enemy ship first wins the battle.
Both fleets are identical, five ships laid in straight lines, either across or down:
| Ship | Squares |
|---|---|
| Aircraft carrier | 5 |
| Battleship | 4 |
| Cruiser | 3 |
| Submarine | 3 |
| Destroyer | 2 |
That’s 17 ship squares out of 100. Ships may not touch each other, and that includes diagonally at the corners, so there is always at least one square of open water between two ships.
Placing your fleet
The game opens with your ships already laid out at random on Your fleet. Happy with it? Tap Start battle. Otherwise tap Shuffle for a fresh random layout, or arrange the ships by hand: tap a ship to select it, then tap the square where you want it to go. Tapping the selected ship a second time turns it between across and down. A move that would make ships overlap, touch or hang off the edge is simply refused.
The computer places its fleet at the same time and you never see it until the game ends.
Firing
You shoot first. Tap any square in Enemy waters that you haven’t fired at yet.
- A splash means a miss.
- A fire marks a hit.
- When every square of a ship has been hit, it is sunk: its outline is drawn and a message names which ship went down.
Each board shows a count of shots and hits, and Enemy ships left lists the ships still afloat. The computer’s shots land on your own grid, so you can watch it work.
The fire-again rule
The Hit = fire again button decides what happens after a hit. When it’s on (the default), a hit gives the same side another shot right away, and a run of hits can sink a whole ship in one turn. When it’s off, every turn is exactly one shot, hit or miss.
You can only change this setting while placing ships. Switching it deals a fresh setup, and the choice is remembered for later games. With fire-again on, the side that finds ships early snowballs, so games are shorter and swingier. With it off, the battle is a slower race of one shot each.
Computer levels
Pick Easy, Medium or Hard from the Computer level buttons. You can switch at any time, even mid-battle, and the next enemy shot uses the new level.
- Easy fires at random most of the time. After a hit it usually, but not always, tries a neighbouring square.
- Medium finishes off any ship it has hit by working along the line. Otherwise it searches in a spaced pattern sized to the smallest ship you still have.
- Hard counts, for every open square, how many ways your remaining ships could still fit across it, and fires at the most likely spot.
None of them cheat. The computer only knows what its own shots have shown it.
Strategy
Search on a grid. The smallest ship covers two squares, so firing at every other square, a checkerboard, is guaranteed to touch every ship. When only bigger ships remain you can space your shots even wider: if the destroyer is gone and the smallest left is three long, every third square in a row is enough.
Finish what you hit. After one hit, try the four neighbours. Two hits in a row tell you the direction; keep going until the ship sinks, then go back to searching.
Let the spacing rule work for you. Since ships never touch, every square around a sunk ship is water. So are the squares diagonal to any hit. Mark those off in your head and don’t spend shots there.
Count the gaps. Late in the game, look at what’s left on the list. A gap of two open squares can’t hold the cruiser. Hard does exactly this, so you can too.
Hide your fleet well. Against Hard, ships in the middle of open water sit where the most layouts overlap. Spreading ships apart and using edges and corners makes them a little harder to find, though no layout is safe.
After a battle, Minesweeper is another game of reading clues from squares you have already uncovered.
If you enjoy Sea Battle, try Snakes and Ladders or Tablut next.
