Sea Battle Strategy: Where to Shoot and Hide Your Ships
To win at Sea Battle, hunt on a checkerboard: every boat is at least two squares long, so shooting every other square is enough to find them all. Start near the middle, where the most boat positions overlap. After a hit, fire at the four squares around it, then follow the line. On GameLake boats never touch, so skip the squares around a sunk boat.
The rules that shape the strategy
Sea Battle is the classic naval guessing game, the one many people know from the board game Battleship. On GameLake you and Hop each hide five boats on a 10×10 lake, rows A to J and columns 1 to 10:
| Boat | Length |
|---|---|
| Ferry | 5 |
| Tugboat | 4 |
| Sailboat | 3 |
| Rowboat | 3 |
| Canoe | 2 |
Two rules matter most for strategy. Boats never touch, not even corner to corner, so there's always a ring of open water around each one. And a hit or a sink earns another shot, so finishing a boat quickly keeps your turn going.
Hunting: shoot on a checkerboard
Picture the lake as a chessboard. A boat two or more squares long, lying across or down, always covers at least one dark square and one light square. So if you only fire at the dark squares you are guaranteed to hit every boat at least once, using at most 50 shots instead of 100.
Once the canoe is sunk, the smallest boat left is three long, and you can spread out even more: every third diagonal is enough, which is only 34 squares.
Aim at the middle first
Not every square is equally likely to hold a boat. Count the ways each boat could lie across a square and the middle wins easily: a corner square can be covered in only 10 ways by the five boats, a centre square in 34. The edges are less likely simply because boats near them have fewer ways to fit.
So start your checkerboard in the middle and work outwards. As misses pile up, recount in your head: a square boxed in by misses can't hold the ferry any more, so open stretches of water become the best targets. This counting is exactly how Hop plays on Hard.
Targeting: after a hit
A hit tells you a boat is there, but not which way it lies. Fire at the four neighbours (up, down, left, right), never the diagonals: boats don't bend. When a second hit shows the direction, keep going along that line until you get a miss, then go back and try the other end.
Since a hit gives you another shot, a well-played target phase can sink a whole boat in one turn.
Use the no-touch rule
When a boat sinks, every square touching it, including the corners, must be empty water. Cross those squares off and don't waste a single shot on them. Around a sunk ferry in open water that's up to 16 squares you never need to fire at.
The same rule helps while hunting. A square wedged between a sunk boat's ring and the edge may be too small for any boat still afloat, so you can skip it too.
Where to hide your ships
On GameLake you don't drag boats around: you press Shuffle boats until you like the layout, and every layout follows the no-touch rule. So the question is which shuffle to keep.
- Against Hop on Hard, favour the edges. Hard aims where boats are most likely to fit, which is the middle. In 3,000 test games we ran with the game's own code, fleets with at least half their squares on the edge lasted about four shots longer against Hard than fleets with less than a fifth there.
- On Easy and Medium, it hardly matters. Easy fires at random and Medium hunts on the checkerboard, so no layout is much safer than another. In our test games the difference was about one shot.
- Against people, avoid patterns. All five boats lined up, or the same layout every game, gets spotted. Mix edges and open water, across and down.
- Hide the canoe well. At two squares it's the hardest boat to find: against Hard it was the last boat standing in more than half of our test games, and a boat still afloat is a game not yet lost.
How Hop plays
| Level | How Hop hunts | After a hit |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Random squares | Finishes the boat off |
| Medium | Random squares on the checkerboard, skipping water around sunk boats | Finishes the boat off |
| Hard | The square where the most boat positions fit, recounted after every shot | Finishes the boat off |
To beat Hard you need to hunt at least as well as he does, which means the checkerboard, the middle first and the no-touch rule together. If you enjoy games of logic and probability, how to win Minesweeper uses the same kind of thinking, and how to win at checkers and winning at 4 in a Row are good next challenges against Hop.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best strategy in Sea Battle?
Hunt on a checkerboard starting from the middle, fire at the four neighbours after a hit and follow the line, and skip every square that touches a sunk boat.
Where is the best place to put your ships?
There's no square that's always safe, but against a probability-based opponent like Hop on Hard, boats along the edges last a little longer because the middle gets searched first. Against people, avoid predictable patterns.
What is the best first shot?
One of the four centre squares (E5, E6, F5 or F6). They can be covered by more boat positions than any other square.
Can ships touch in Sea Battle?
Not on GameLake: boats never touch, even at the corners. Some tabletop rules allow touching, so agree on it before playing with friends.
Do you get another turn after a hit?
On GameLake, yes: a hit or a sink lets you fire again. After a miss, it's the other player's turn.