About Sea Battle

The pencil-and-paper naval game. You and the computer each hide a fleet of five ships on a ten-by-ten grid — five, four, three, three and two squares long — and take it in turns to fire at a square of the other's waters. A shot is a miss, a hit, or the last hit that sinks a ship. Sink the whole enemy fleet before yours goes down.

This is the old version with the rule that no two ships may touch, not even at the corners, and the rule turns the hunt into a puzzle. A hit tells you the four squares diagonal to it are water; a sunk ship tells you the whole ring of squares round it is water. Those squares are marked for you the moment they are known, for both sides, so every shot goes where a ship might still be. Where the ships that are left can still fit — and where they can't — is the whole game.

Place your own fleet by hand or shuffle it, then go. The computer plays fair: it only knows where its own shots have landed. Easy follows up its hits only half the time, Normal closes in on every hit, and Hard counts every way your remaining ships could lie and fires where most of them cross. The daily battle is the same enemy fleet for everyone, at Normal, ranked by the fewest shots to win.

Tips to win

• After a hit, try the four squares next to it; after two in a row, keep going along the line
• Hunt on a chequerboard: every ship is at least two long, so half the squares are enough to find them all
• Look for gaps too small for the smallest ship left afloat and leave them alone
• Hide your own ships away from each other, not all along the edges where they are easy to trap