🚢 Battleship
Battleship for up to four, where a hit gives you an extra turn — and two modes that change who you are shooting at.
- Up to 4 players
- Classic
- In your browser, free
- With friends or against bots
Place, then fire
First everyone positions their fleet on their own grid, in secret. Then the shooting starts: on your turn you pick a square on the enemy grid. A miss passes the turn; a hit gives you another shot.
The extra-turn rule is what makes the game aggressive: a good streak can sink an entire ship without the opponent playing.
The two modes
- Normal — each player always shoots at the next one in the line, in a circle: 1 aims at 2, 2 at 3, and the last one comes back to 1. You are hunted by one person and you hunt one person.
- War — anything goes: every shot, you pick any living opponent.
With four players these are different games. In normal, helping the person shooting at you makes no sense; in war, the leader becomes everyone's target, and doing too well too early is dangerous.
How to hunt
After a hit, the four orthogonal neighbours are the only squares that matter — ships are always straight. Once the second hit confirms the direction, follow the line until you get water at both ends.
And while you are searching, a diagonal pattern covers more ground per shot than sweeping row by row: since the smallest ship takes two squares, a diagonal mesh cannot leave any whole ship hidden.
The placement phase, which decides more than it seems
Before the first shot, each player builds their fleet: you pick the orientation with a button that toggles between horizontal and vertical, then click the square where the ship starts. Nobody sees anyone's fleet, and the match only begins once everyone is done.
Two human tendencies work against players here, and they are worth knowing: almost everyone avoids the edges (they feel exposed) and almost everyone avoids putting ships next to each other (it feels risky). The result is a crowded middle and empty margins — so both hiding ships on the edge and starting your hunt in the centre tend to pay.
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