How to Play the Battleship Board Game

Battleship is a two-player war-themed board game where opponents try to guess the location of each other's warships and then sink them. A paper and pencil version of the game dates back to World War I, but most people are familiar with Battleship through the plastic board game first marketed by the Milton Bradley Company in 1967 and now produced by Hasbro. Since the launch of the original board game, more Battleship variations have become popular, including video games and smartphone apps. But, throughout Battleship history, the rules for playing have remained relatively the same.

So, how do you play Battleship? The game is pretty straightforward. Each player places ships on a plastic grid containing vertical and horizontal coordinates, but players keep their ships' locations secret from their opponent. Players take turns calling out row and column coordinates on the other player's grid in an attempt to identify a square that contains a ship. 

The game board each player gets has two grids: an upper and a lower. The player uses the lower grid to place and hide his ships. He uses the upper grid to record shots fired (by calling out coordinates) toward his opponent and to document whether those shots were hits or misses.

Setting up the Game

Each player receives a game board, five ships of varying lengths (each ship has holes to insert the "hit" pegs), and a supply of hit and miss markers (white and red pegs).

The five ships are:

• Carrier (five holes)
• Battleship (four holes)
• Cruiser (three holes)
• Submarine (three holes)
• Destroyer (two holes)

The two players should face each other across a game table. Their grids back up to one another so that neither player can see his opponent's "ocean" and ship locations.

Before the game starts, each opponent secretly places his five ships on the ocean grid (lower part of the board) by laying out the ships and anchoring them into the holes on the grid. Each ship must be placed horizontally or vertically across grid spaces—not diagonally—and the ships can't hang off the grid. Ships can touch each other, but they can't occupy the same grid space. You cannot change the position of the ships after the game begins.

Basic Gameplay

Players take turns firing shots (by calling out a grid coordinate) to attempt to hit the opponent's enemy ships.

On your turn, call out a letter and a number that identifies a row and column on your target grid. Your opponent checks that coordinate on their ocean grid and verbally responds "miss" if there is no ship there, or "hit" if you have correctly guessed a space that is occupied by a ship.

Mark each of your shots or attempts to fire on the enemy using your target grid (upper part of the board), using white pegs to document your misses and red pegs to register your hits. As the game proceeds, the red pegs will gradually identify the size and location of your opponent's ships.

After you've taken your turn, it's your opponent's turn to fire shots at you. Each time one of your ships receives a hit, put a red peg into the hole on the ship corresponding to the grid space. When one of your ships has every slot filled with red pegs, you must announce to your opponent that your ship is sunk. In classic play, the phrase is "You sunk my battleship!"

The first player to sink all five of their opponent's ships wins the game.

Advanced Gameplay

Experienced Battleship players sometimes use a variation of the game, known as Salvo. The basic rules remain the same with the following exceptions:

• In the first round of the game, you call out five shots (guesses) and mark each shot with a white peg in your target grid.
• After you've called out all five shots (a salvo), your opponent announces which ones were hits and which ships the shots hit.
• For hits, change the white pegs on your target grid to red pegs. Meanwhile, your opponent will place red pegs in the holes of any enemy ships that you hit.
• Alternate back and forth in this manner until one of your ships is sunk. At that point, you lose one shot from your salvo. If one of your ships sinks, for example, your salvo is now reduced to four shots; when two ships sink, the salvo is three shots, and so on.
• Continue gameplay until one player sinks all the opposing ships and wins the game.

Pencil and Paper Version

It is also possible to play a classic game of Battleship by drawing ocean grids on paper and labeling horizontal and vertical rows to create coordinates. You can make a do-it-yourself board quite easily. For example, for a basic 100-square ocean, label the horizontal rows 1 through 10, and the vertical rows A through J.

As with the traditional board game, each player will need two ocean grids. One grid marks the hiding position of your five ships and any hits the opponent makes on those ships. The second grid keeps track of the hits and misses you make when you fire shots at the opponent. When a shot hits, mark the corresponding square with an X; document the misses with a 0. 

For a more difficult game, you could make a larger grid with more squares, using letters A through Z to label the vertical coordinates and the numbers 1 through 26 for the horizontal rows. The larger the ocean grid, the more difficult the game becomes.