Sea Battle — Free

What is Sea Battle?

Sea Battle is a two-player guessing duel fought between two hidden fleets — the digital version of the classic pen-and-paper ships-guessing game (the one you may know as Battleship) that generations have scribbled on graph paper. Each admiral has a private 10×10 ocean and a small fleet of five ships. Neither side can see where the other has hidden its vessels, so the whole contest becomes a battle of deduction: you call out coordinates, the enemy tells you whether you struck steel or splashed into open water, and little by little you triangulate exactly where each ship is lying before you finish it off.

On vygam you face a sharp computer opponent. The game runs in two phases. First comes deployment, where you arrange your Carrier, Cruiser, Destroyer, Submarine and Patrol Boat anywhere on your grid — across or down, as close together or as spread out as you like, as long as no two ships overlap. Then the battle begins: you and the computer alternate firing single shots at each other's waters. Every shot is marked as a hit or a miss, a ship with all of its cells struck is announced as sunk, and the first commander to send the entire enemy fleet to the bottom wins. Because ships never move once placed, victory comes down to smart placement, disciplined searching and reading the pattern of your hits.

How to Play

Sea Battle has a few firm rules the game enforces for you. A move is illegal or simply does nothing when:

• a ship is placed so that part of it would hang off the edge of the 10×10 grid;
• a ship is placed so that it overlaps or shares a square with a ship you already positioned;
• you fire at a square in enemy waters you have already targeted — repeat shots are ignored and never waste a turn;
• you try to start the battle before all five ships have been deployed.

Sea Battle Tips & Strategy

Sea Battle looks like pure luck, but strong players win far more often than they lose. The difference is in how you search the water and where you hide your own fleet. These four techniques will tighten both halves of your game.

1. Hunt, then target

   Split your play into two modes. While "hunting," you have no live leads, so you fire to explore the ocean and find any ship. The moment you score a hit you switch to "targeting": fire only at the squares directly above, below, left and right of the hit until you work out the ship's line, then follow that line to both ends. Finishing a wounded ship before wandering off keeps your shots efficient and stops half-sunk vessels lingering to bite you later.

2. Fire on a checkerboard

   The smallest ship is two cells long, so it must cover at least one square of every other colour on a checkerboard. That means you only need to search half the board to be guaranteed a touch on every ship. During the hunting phase, fire only at the "black" squares — the ones where the row and column numbers add up to an even total — and you'll locate ships in roughly half as many shots as random firing would take.

3. Place ships with spacing in mind

   Since ships may sit edge to edge, clustering your whole fleet in one corner is dangerous — a single lucky hit can lead the enemy straight into the neighbours. Spread your vessels around the board and mix horizontal with vertical so no pattern repeats. Many players also avoid the edges for the big ships, because a hit on open water gives your opponent more directions to guess wrong.

4. Track the shrinking fleet

   Watch the "ships afloat" counters and the battle log. Once a ship is sunk you know its exact length is off the board, which changes the odds everywhere else — if only the five-cell Carrier remains, there is no point probing gaps too short to hold it. Mentally cross off water that can no longer contain any surviving ship and concentrate every shot where the remaining fleet must be hiding.

The Fleet and the Grid

Each side commands the same five ships, so no one starts with an advantage. The fleet is made up of a five-cell Carrier, a four-cell Cruiser, a three-cell Destroyer, a three-cell Submarine and a two-cell Patrol Boat — seventeen cells of steel hidden across a hundred squares of ocean. Because the two three-cell ships are identical in length, sinking one still leaves you guessing which of the mid-size vessels you actually destroyed, which is part of what keeps the endgame tense.

The grid is a standard 10×10 ocean, giving one hundred possible targets per side. Your best score and running record live in your browser's local storage, so your wins and losses are remembered between visits on the same device without any account. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no timer pressure — Sea Battle rewards patience, so you can take as long as you like to line up the perfect shot and reason your way through the fog to the last enemy ship.

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