Battle Squares

A sea battle on a tabletop. In front of you, a clay sea marked into a hundred squares, ten by ten, and on it your fleet: a carrier with its planes coming and going, a battleship, a cruiser and a destroyer, their turrets turning now and then, radars going round and small inflatable boats running between them. Floating over the far side of the table is a dark glass operations display with the other side's waters ruled on it in glowing lines. Their fleet is out there somewhere, and so far the display is blank.

How it plays

You and the computer take turns calling squares. On your turn, pick a square on the display: tap or click it, or move the bright marker with the arrow keys and press Enter. A missile leaves your battleship's forward turret and comes down on that square, which lights up pale for a miss or amber for a hit. Hit every square of one of their ships and it is sunk, and you are told which. Then the computer calls a square of your sea: a shell comes down on it, a splash and a ring of foam if it missed, a fire on the deck if it hit, and a ship hit in every square settles low in the water while the inflatables take its crew off. Whoever sinks the other side's four ships first wins.

The fleets are placed at random for every game, with a square of open water round every ship, so no two ships ever touch. The computer plays three ways. On Easy it calls about half its squares at random. On Medium it mostly plays well. On Hard it hunts the way a good player does: it calls a checkerboard pattern of squares, since even the smallest ship covers two, and once it hits something it works round that square and then along the line of hits until the ship is sunk.

Tips

Hunt on a checkerboard too: every ship covers at least two squares in a row, so half the sea is enough to find them all. When you hit something, try the four squares round it, and once you have two hits in a line, keep going along that line in both directions. Remember that ships never touch, so the squares round a sunk ship are open water and not worth a call. The fewer calls you take to win, the higher your score.

Battle Squares needs WebGL; on a machine without it the page says so, and the 2D games in the arcade still work. Nobody is hurt: a ship that goes down lists and settles, and its crew are picked up from the water.

Play Battle Squares (free, in the browser; back to all games)