Controls

You play in two phases: placing and firing. First arrange your five ships on your own grid. Then take turns tapping squares on the enemy grid to fire shots.

Each shot gives you one piece of information:

• Hits and misses are marked as you fire. A hit means you struck part of a ship, and a miss means empty water. Reading the pattern of both is how you locate the enemy fleet.
• Sinking a ship requires hitting every square it occupies. When you hit, probing the neighboring squares reveals the ship's direction so you can finish it off.

You take turns firing, so you and the computer are racing to sink each other's fleets first.

At higher of the eight levels, the computer uses probability to target your ships more efficiently, so protect your wounded ships by winning quickly.

Tips

• After a hit, probe the four neighbors. A ship runs in a straight line, so once you hit one square, firing at the squares directly around it quickly reveals the direction to finish it off.
• Finish a wounded ship before moving on. Leaving a partly-hit ship gives the enemy time, and scattered damage wastes shots, so once you find a ship, sink it completely before hunting elsewhere.
• Search in a spread-out pattern. Since the smallest ships still cover two squares, firing in a checkerboard or spaced pattern covers the grid efficiently and can't miss a ship entirely.
• Place your own ships apart. Clustering your fleet lets a single lucky enemy hit lead straight to the next ship, so spreading them out makes you harder to map.
• Use misses as information. A miss isn't wasted, it rules out squares, so tracking where the empty water is narrows down where the remaining ships must be hiding.
• Watch the enemy's likely lines. Once you know a ship's orientation from two hits, you know exactly where its remaining squares are, so aim there rather than firing around it.

Frequently asked questions