Battleship looks like a guessing game. Pick a square, hope you hit something, repeat. Most people play it that way and assume luck determines who wins.

It is not a guessing game. There is a real strategy, and once you know it, you will never play the same way again.

But first, where it came from.

World War I soldiers invented it

The exact origin of Battleship is genuinely murky, which is unusual for a game this famous. What historians agree on is that pencil and paper versions of the same basic idea, two players plotting ships on hidden grids and calling out coordinates to find each other's fleet, were circulating among French and Russian soldiers in the early 1900s.

The French connection runs through a game called L'Attaque, a paper-based grid contest that bears a clear resemblance to what Battleship became. Russian officers were reportedly playing a hand-drawn version on paper grids before and during World War I. Both versions were essentially informal, passed between soldiers the way card games pass through barracks. Nobody patented it. Nobody owned it. It just spread.

The first commercial version appeared in 1931. An American company called Starex published a game called Salvo which included pre-printed paper grids, making it easier to play consistently without drawing your own board every time. Milton Bradley followed with their own pad-and-pencil version in 1943 called Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy.

Milton Bradley made it famous in 1967

The version most people picture when they hear Battleship arrived in 1967. Milton Bradley released a set with two folding plastic cases, moulded plastic ships, and the now-iconic red and white pegs for marking hits and misses. No more pencil and paper. The game became self-contained, portable, and repeatable without any setup beyond placing your ships.

Milton Bradley advertised Battleship during the Saturday morning cartoon lineup that dominated many children's television viewing in the late 1960s, as well as during prime-time programming. The combination of a distinctive product and aggressive television advertising turned a pencil and paper game that had been floating around for fifty years into one of the best-selling board games ever made.

Since 1967, the Battleship board game has sold more than 100 million copies. Electronic versions followed in 1977 and 1989. A film adaptation arrived in 2012, featuring Rihanna in a supporting role, which is one of the stranger sentences in board game history.

The strategy most people never figure out

Here is the thing about Battleship. It rewards systematic thinking, not lucky guessing. Most players lose games they could have won by wasting shots on cells where no ship could possibly be.

The checkerboard pattern

The smallest ship in standard Battleship is two cells long. A two-cell ship must cover at least one cell of each colour if you mentally overlay a checkerboard pattern on the board. This means you can find every ship on the board while shooting only half the cells, targeting only the cells of one colour and ignoring the other completely.

Most casual players shoot randomly and spend shots on adjacent cells even when no ship could fit there given the ships already sunk. The checkerboard pattern eliminates all of those wasted shots.

Hunt mode and target mode

Good players switch between two mental states. In hunt mode, you use the checkerboard pattern to find the first cell of a ship. The moment you get a hit, you switch to target mode: check the adjacent cells systematically, working along the axis of the ship until it is sunk. Only then do you return to hunt mode.

The mistake most players make is staying in hunt mode after a hit, taking random shots elsewhere and leaving a wounded ship partially intact. Finish what you started before moving on.

Where to place your ships

Most players instinctively put ships along the edges and in corners, which is exactly where most opponents look first. Placing ships in the centre of the board and avoiding neat horizontal or vertical arrangements makes them harder to find.

Separating ships so they are not adjacent also helps. When an opponent sinks one ship, they often probe the surrounding cells looking for neighbours. Ships that are isolated give nothing away.

The probability approach

The most sophisticated strategy involves thinking about which cells are most likely to contain a ship given what has already been revealed. Cells near the centre of the board can be covered by more possible ship configurations than edge or corner cells, making them statistically higher priority targets early in the game.

This is not as complicated as it sounds in practice. It just means that when you are in hunt mode and choosing between two cells of equal checkerboard priority, the one closer to the centre of the remaining unsearched area is the better choice.

Why it has lasted a hundred years

Battleship started as an informal game passed between soldiers on scraps of paper. It has since sold over 100 million copies, spawned electronic versions, video games, mobile apps, and a film with Rihanna. The core idea has not changed once.

Two hidden grids. Five ships. Red peg for a hit, white peg for a miss. The player who sinks the other fleet first wins.

Simple enough to explain in a minute. Deep enough that most people are still playing it wrong.

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Sources

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