Play Battleships Online — Free
Find all the ships hidden in the grid using row and column clues. Ships cannot touch each other.
Choose a puzzle
About Battleships
Battleships is a deductive puzzle based on the classic board game, but played entirely solo. A fleet of ships — one 4-cell battleship, two 3-cell cruisers, three 2-cell destroyers, and four 1-cell submarines — is hidden in the grid. Row and column clues tell you how many cells of each line contain ship parts, and some ship segments may be revealed as starting hints.
Ships cannot touch each other — not even diagonally. This constraint, combined with the fleet composition and row/column counts, creates a rich deductive puzzle. You’re essentially solving a constraint satisfaction problem over ship shapes and positions.
Battleships puzzles have appeared in puzzle magazines since the 1980s and are a staple of the Games magazine tradition. The satisfying “click” of fitting all ships into the grid without contradiction is hard to replicate in any other puzzle type.
Always place the largest ship first — the 4-cell battleship has the fewest possible positions, so pinning it down immediately removes a huge chunk of candidate space for the rest of the fleet.
Frequently asked questions
How do you play Battleships?
Numbers on the sides tell you how many ship segments are in each row and column. Use logic to place the fleet without any two ships touching (including diagonally).