Sink the Fleet — Solo Ship-Hunting Puzzle
Fire at a hidden 10x10 grid to find and sink 5 computer-placed ships. Count your shots!
How to play
- Click any cell on the 10×10 grid to fire at that position.
- Red (✕) = hit a ship cell. Blue (·) = miss.
- A ship is sunk when every cell it occupies has been hit.
- Try to sink all 5 ships with as few shots as possible.
- Click 'New Game' to get a freshly placed fleet.
Fire at a hidden 10×10 ocean grid to find and sink 5 ships (lengths 5, 4, 3, 3, and 2). Red = hit, blue = miss. Sink the whole fleet in as few shots as possible!
How it works
Sink the Fleet is a solo puzzle inspired by the classic Battleship game. The computer secretly places five ships on a hidden 10x10 grid. Your job is to find and sink every ship by clicking cells to fire shots. A hit is marked differently from a miss, letting you deduce ship locations from the pattern of results.
The five ships occupy different numbers of consecutive cells — typically a carrier (5), battleship (4), cruiser (3), submarine (3), and destroyer (2). Ships are placed horizontally or vertically and cannot overlap. Once you have hit every cell of a ship, it is sunk and identified. The game ends when all ships are sunk; your score is the total number of shots fired.
Efficient play uses logic rather than random guessing. A common approach is a checkerboard-pattern search phase: since the smallest ship occupies 2 cells, firing on every other cell in a diagonal grid pattern guarantees you will hit every ship while firing roughly half as many shots as a full scan. Once a hit is found, switch to a hunt phase and probe adjacent cells to find the ship's full extent.
This tool is a satisfying test of deductive reasoning and search strategy. Comparing your shot count across games is a simple way to track improvement.
Worked example
Use checkerboard search to find ships efficiently
- Start by clicking cells in a checkerboard pattern — fire on (row 1, col 1), then (row 1, col 3), then (row 1, col 5), and so on, shifting one column on even rows.
- Continue this pattern across the board. Every ship of length 2 or more is guaranteed to include at least one of these cells.
- When you get a hit, switch to hunt mode: fire at each of the four adjacent cells (up, down, left, right) to find the ship's second cell.
- Once two cells of the ship are found, you know its orientation. Continue in that direction until the ship is sunk.
- Return to the checkerboard search pattern to find the remaining ships.
All five ships sunk in significantly fewer shots than random firing would require.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Firing randomly after the first hit instead of systematically probing adjacent cells — this wastes shots and can leave part of the ship unfound.
- Forgetting to mark misses: without tracking where you have already fired you will waste shots repeating the same cells.
- Not narrowing the search space after sinking a ship — once a ship's cells are confirmed, its neighbours are empty and can be excluded from future shots.
Key terms
- Hit
- A shot that lands on a cell occupied by a ship, revealed by a distinct marker on the grid.
- Miss
- A shot on an empty cell; recorded on the grid so you do not fire there again.
- Sunk
- A ship whose every cell has been hit; it is fully revealed and removed from the hidden fleet count.
Frequently asked questions
- How many ships are there?
- 5 ships: a carrier (5), battleship (4), two submarines (3 each), and a patrol boat (2) — 17 ship cells in total.
- Can I see the ships after the game?
- When you win all ships become fully revealed in red.