THE FULL READ
Battleship is the game everyone played as a kid and few have played as an adult, which is a shame because there's a genuine probability puzzle hiding underneath the kids'-game packaging. Modern hobby gamers tend to dismiss it without realising the optimal strategy is non-trivial.
The single biggest discovery for intermediate players is *parity*. Battleship ships are all 2+ squares long, which means at least one of every two squares on the board must be empty (otherwise no ship could fit). If you only target squares matching one parity (think of a checkerboard pattern and only shoot the dark squares), you're guaranteed to hit every ship in half the shots — even a 2-square destroyer can't hide between two same-color squares. Going from random shooting to parity hunting cuts your average game length from ~60 shots to ~35.
The hunt-and-target loop matters. Once you score a hit, every adjacent square is a possible continuation. Shoot the four cardinal neighbours; once you score a second hit, the ship's orientation is locked, and you can finish it efficiently. Most players waste shots probing diagonal squares after a hit, which is impossible — ships don't bend.
Ship placement is the other half of the game and is consistently underrated. Most casual players cluster ships in corners (thinking opponents won't shoot there) — which is exactly where opponents *will* shoot once they realise parity sweeps cover the board evenly. The veteran placement is to scatter ships across the board with at least one square between any two ships, and to put the longest ships *near* the edges but not on them.
Battleship has had several modern reimaginings (Captain Sonar is a real-time team variant that's genuinely excellent; Operation Squad does ship-to-ship combat on a real grid). But the original remains a permanent fixture for what it is — a 20-minute, two-player, no-explanation-needed pickup game. Pull it out, parity-sweep, win in 35 shots, and put it away for another year.
