Long before "You sank my battleship!" became a catchphrase, Battleship was just a way for soldiers to kill time on paper — guessing coordinates, hoping for a hit, dreading a miss.
How to Play Battleship
Each player has their own 10x10 grid, labeled with letters along one side and numbers along the other so every square has a unique coordinate. Before play starts, each player secretly places a fleet of ships on their own grid — typically a five-square carrier, a four-square battleship, two three-square ships (a cruiser and a submarine), and a two-square patrol boat — placed horizontally or vertically, never diagonally, and never overlapping.
Players then take turns calling out a coordinate on the opponent's grid, trying to guess where their ships are hiding. The opponent reports back whether it's a "hit" or a "miss," and if a ship's every square has been hit, its owner announces it as "sunk." Both players track their guesses (and results) on a separate tracking grid. The first player to sink every ship in their opponent's fleet wins — it's a pure game of deduction, probability, and a little bit of nerve.
The History of Battleship
Battleship began life as a pencil-and-paper guessing game, generally traced to the World War I era, with some accounts suggesting it was played informally by Russian officers even before the war. Its exact roots are hard to pin down precisely because pencil-and-paper games rarely leave records, but it clearly shares DNA with earlier grid-guessing games like E. I. Horsman's 1890 game Basilinda.
The game got its first commercial releases in the 1930s under different names and publishers — Starex Novelty Co.'s "Salvo" in 1931 and The Strathmore Company's "Combat, The Battleship Game" in 1933 among them. Milton Bradley entered the picture with its own pencil-and-paper edition, "Broadsides, The Game of Naval Strategy," in 1943. The game most people recognize today, though, arrived in 1967, when Milton Bradley released a plastic version with pegboards, plastic pegs, and miniature ships, replacing paper and pencil entirely — that version turned Battleship into a mainstream household staple. Milton Bradley later pushed it further with an electronic, microprocessor-based edition in 1977, one of the earliest electronic toys of its kind. From wartime notepads to plastic pegboards to browser tabs, Battleship's core idea — hunt blind, guess smart — hasn't changed in over a century. It's one of the tabletop imports covered in our classic board game lineup, and if strategic guessing games are your thing, check out our roundup of best free browser games for more.
Why Play Battleship on RivalPit
- Free and no download. Battleship runs instantly in your browser.
- Real-time multiplayer. Challenge a friend with a link, or play a solid CPU opponent.
- Live chat and points. Talk trash mid-match, earn points by playing (never purchased).
- One of 100+ free games on RivalPit, with new games added every week.