Sea Battle: placing your fleet and hunting the enemy

Sea Battle is the hidden-fleet game where you and the computer each tuck ships away on a grid and then take turns firing blind into the other's waters. Sink all five enemy ships before they sink yours and you win. In Games by Zaweba it sits on the Board games shelf, and the sea is drawn with splashes for misses and flames for hits.

It is a game of two halves. Placing your fleet is a quiet puzzle, and the battle that follows is a mix of luck, deduction and a little nerve.

Placing your fleet

Before the shooting starts, place your five ships on your grid. They may touch each other, but they may not overlap. Drag each ship onto the grid, or click to pick it up and click again to drop it. To turn a ship, press R, right-click, or use the Rotate button.

If you would rather get straight to the battle, Auto-place puts your fleet down for you.

The battle

Once both fleets are hidden, you take turns firing at a square of the enemy's waters. Click a square to fire. A splash means a miss. Flames mark a hit. When every square of a ship has been hit, it sinks.

The computer does the same to your grid. The first side to lose all five ships loses the game.

Hiding ships well

Where you put your fleet matters more than many people think. Ships packed tightly together can be found quickly, since one hit leads the computer to search nearby and stumble on the next. Spreading them out means each ship has to be found from scratch.

The rules let ships touch, and that can be used to your advantage now and then, since a search around one ship may end without finding its neighbour. But be careful, because a cluster can also give several ships away at once.

Avoid patterns. Ships all lined up in one direction, or all along the edges, are easier to read than a mix of across and up and down, scattered around the grid. Rotating a few ships is quick, and worth doing.

Searching the enemy waters

At the start, you know nothing. Spread your shots across the grid rather than firing in one small area. Since every ship takes up more than one square, you do not need to fire at every square to find them. Leaving gaps in a regular pattern covers the sea more efficiently.

When you score a hit, switch from searching to hunting. Fire at the squares next to it to find which way the ship lies. Once you have two hits in a line, carry on along that line until the ship sinks.

Keep track of which ships are still afloat. Knowing the size of what remains tells you where a ship could still fit, and where it could not. Large empty stretches of sea are where the last ships tend to hide.

A game with a bit of drama

Sea Battle in Games by Zaweba is a fine game for a short evening, with its splashes and flames giving every shot a moment of suspense. Esc pauses mid battle, F1 brings back the rules, and your wins against the computer are counted on the game's tile in the library. It is one of the few games on the Board games shelf where the computer cannot see your pieces and you cannot see its, which gives it a quite different feel from the open boards of Draughts and Mill.