How to Play Warships (aka Battleships)

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Warships is a puzzle game based on the popular board game Battleships. It’s a game of strategy where you have to find all the ships!

How to Play Warships

Warships is a single-player puzzle game.

The goal is to find the fleet of warships as quickly as possible. Every warships fleet contains:

One battleship (4 squares)
Two cruisers (3 squares each)
Three destroyers (2 squares each)
4 submarines (1 square each)

Each game of warships is played on a 10×10 grid. For each row, you’re given a number. This number tells you how many ship segments are in that row. You’re also given a number for each column which also corresponds to the number of ship segments in that column.

The ships may be horizontal and/or vertical on the grid but they will not be diagonal. Furthermore, ships cannot touch each other. That means they cannot occupy adjacent squares (even diagonally).

The hardest level of warships will be a completely blank grid. however, some puzzles will contain hints. These hints can be flags to represent a blank space or pieces of ships.

A solid block represents a middle part of a ship.
A curved shape represents the start or the end of a ship.

Warship Tips & Example

Warships is a fun game to play solo. Let’s work through this example (that has 3 hints) to learn some tips & tricks.

Zero

Along the right and bottom, you’ll see numbers. These are how many warship pieces are in that row/column.

So the easiest thing to do is start with any 0’s. Since these are whole rows/columns I’m going to just color them.

I’m also going to mark how many pieces I’ve found beside the numbers (right now that’s only the hints).

No touching!

Hints are great! We can see that our ship pieces are all curved, so we know they aren’t just one block. That means each of the hints will be 2 (or more) blocks. So I’m extending them most of the way into the next block (because I don’t know if I’ll need to extend further or round them).

The rules indicate that ships cannot be adjacent to one another (even diagonally). So I’m going to mark off all the surrounding squares as not containing ships. This is something you should do every time you find a ship piece.

Where is the Battleship?

The Battleship is the biggest ship. It requires 4 squares which means it will have the fewest possibilities.

The example has 4 potential rows/columns for it (indicated because they have a four around the edge).

We know it isn’t the column because there’s only room for a 3-length ship. We know it’s not the bottom 2 rows because they both already have single pieces in them.

This means the only place the Battleship can fit in the third row down (the top 4 row).

The Battleship could fit in three different ways (indicated by the different blue lines). But, no matter which way it goes, it will always cover the 2 squares in the green outline.

Since we’ve found pieces…

We need to mark how many pieces we’ve found around the edges. This shows us that we have the one-piece needed in the 6th column. Yes! Let’s “clear” that column.

We can also put an X in the 3rd row 2nd column box. We know that all four of the pieces in the third row are going to be part of the battleship so they cannot have one here.

This has the added benefit of finishing one of the Destroyers. Yes! (And let’s put a little check near destroyer so we know we’ve completed one).

Limited Options

Sometimes there are places where your options are limited.

For example, column 2 must have 3 pieces. We already have 2 of them and the remaining piece must go in one of two places.

Those 2 options are touching, which means the two spaces next to them (in column 3) cannot contain any ship pieces.

Since we know column 3 needs 3 ship pieces and we already have two of them, there’s only one place forthe last one.

Now we’ve found a Cruiser!

Cruisers and more

It’s usually a good idea to find out where your cruisers could be. In this puzzle, we’ve already found one and there are 2 possibilities for the second.

You can also look at big numbers (around the edges) and see what possibilities still exist.

Now it’s time for you to use some logic and solve the puzzle. Good luck!

The solution can be found at the end of this post.