Battleships puzzle rules require placing one length-3 ship, one length-2 ship, and one length-1 ship on a 5x5 grid so every row and column contains exactly the printed number of ship segments and no two ships touch, even at a corner. Unlike the two-player paper-and-pencil guessing game where you fire salvos and deduce a hidden fleet, the Battleships logic puzzle shows you the entire board and every clue from the start. Your only job is to commit the disclosed fleet to the right cells. Every ship must run in a straight line, either horizontally or vertically, and the six occupied cells must line up with the five row totals and five column totals printed on the edges of the grid. With three ships, nineteen water cells, and a strict separation rule, each placement must satisfy the fleet, the separation rule, and every printed clue at once. Every occupied cell must be a member of one of the three straight ships; every cell that is not part of a ship must be empty water. That binary distinction is what gives the puzzle its snap, because there is no grey area, no probabilistic deduction, and no hidden information to second-guess. That clarity is what makes Battleships a favourite introduction to fixed logic puzzles alongside Hashi and Heyawake.
What Makes the Battleships Puzzle Different From the Guessing Game
The classic board game Battleship hides ten ships behind a personal grid and lets two players take turns calling coordinates. Nothing is on the table except hits, misses, and the slow reveal of the opponent's fleet. The Battleships logic puzzle works the opposite way. There is no opponent, no hidden ships, and no guessing. The puzzle shows you the full grid and asks you to place a tiny fleet whose exact sizes are written down before play begins. Conceptis, the specialist puzzle publisher that carries the official rules reference for this format, treats it as a pure deduction puzzle where every cell can be decided by reasoning alone (Conceptis - Battleships rules).
Games Magazine describes the same format with the same constraints: ships are straight, ships do not touch, the fleet is fixed in advance, and the row and column totals drive the logic (Games Magazine - Battleships instructions). The board you play on in your browser is a compact 5x5 instance of that same format, sized down so a single puzzle can be finished in a short sitting without losing the chain-of-deductions feel.
Because nothing is hidden, there is also no luck. A correct solution exists for the published clues, and the disclosed arrangement satisfies every row, every column, the fleet, and the separation rule. Your job is to find it.
The Three Hard Rules Every Battleships Puzzle Enforces
Every Battleships logic puzzle, including the browser version hosted on Lizely, checks the same three constraints on top of the clue totals. If any one of them fails, the board is incomplete.
Rule 1: Ships Are Straight
Each ship must occupy a single horizontal or vertical line of cells. A connected group of occupied cells that bends at a right angle is a contradiction, even if it has the right total length. The validator groups orthogonally adjacent occupied cells into components and rejects any component that touches more than one row and more than one column.
Rule 2: Ships Do Not Touch
Distinct ships are separated by water on every side, including the diagonals. A cell next to one ship, even diagonally, must be empty or it belongs to that ship. The validator scans the eight neighbours of every occupied cell and rejects any pair from different components that share a corner.
Rule 3: The Fleet Is Fixed
The browser version declares its fleet up front: one cruiser of length 3, one destroyer of length 2, and one submarine of length 1, occupying six cells in total. A board that contains, say, two length-3 ships and no length-1 submarine fails the fleet check even if every row and column total happens to match. The exact fleet is shown in the table below.
| Ship | Length | Cells in fleet |
|---|---|---|
| Cruiser | 3 | 3 |
| Destroyer | 2 | 2 |
| Submarine | 1 | 1 |
| Fleet total | -- | 6 |
Because the fleet is always six cells and the grid has twenty-five cells, nineteen cells must remain water. That 6-to-19 split is itself a useful sanity check while you work.
How to Read the Row and Column Clues
Around the 5x5 playing area, two strips of numbers tell you exactly how many ship segments belong in each line. A clue of 0 means the row or column is empty. A clue of 3 on a row of length five means three of the five cells in that row are ship cells. The browser version's clues are fixed and disclosed up front:
| Line | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Row clues (top to bottom) | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Column clues (left to right) | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
Two clues are the most useful to start with. Row 2's clue is 0, so the entire second row is water; you cannot place a ship segment there at all. Column 4's clue is also 0, so the entire fourth column is water. Those two lines remove nine cells from consideration in a single glance.
Adding the row clues 3 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 gives 6, exactly the number of ship cells in the fleet. Adding the column clues 1 + 2 + 1 + 0 + 2 also gives 6. That match is a useful sanity check on the puzzle itself: if the row and column totals disagree on the fleet size, the puzzle has been misprinted. Reading the clues is really counting where each ship crosses from one line to the next.
Solving the Puzzle Step by Step
Open the Battleships Puzzle in your browser and you will land on a 5x5 grid with the clues already printed along the top, bottom, left, and right edges. The puzzle is keyboard-first but works with the mouse too. Work through these steps in order.
- Place your cursor on the top-left cell. Use the arrow keys to move to row 1, column 1. The selected cell is announced for screen readers and visually highlighted. Moving up from row 1 or left from column 1 is ignored, so you cannot wander off the board.
- Mark the empty lines. Use the arrow keys to walk the second row and the fourth column. Press Enter on each cell to drop an optional water mark, a personal reasoning hint that does not change the score or the validator.
- Lock in the top cruiser. Row 1's clue is 3, and the column clues for the first three columns are 1, 2, and 1, so a length-3 ship fits exactly across row 1, columns 1 through 3. Press Space on each of those three cells to add a ship segment. Three Space actions, three new ship cells.
- Place the destroyer. Column 5's clue is 2, and rows 3 and 4 each show a clue of 1. A vertical length-2 ship in column 5 spanning rows 3 and 4 satisfies both row clues at once. Move to row 3, column 5, press Space, then move to row 4, column 5 and press Space again. That adds two ship cells and completes the column-5 clue.
- Drop the submarine. Row 5's clue is 1, and column 2 still needs one more ship cell to reach its clue of 2. The intersection is row 5, column 2. Press Space there to place the lone submarine cell.
- Verify the separation rule. Walk the cells diagonally adjacent to each ship. Every neighbour of a ship cell, orthogonal and diagonal, should be water. If any neighbour is a ship cell from a different component, the validator rejects the placement.
- Check all five row clues and all five column clues. They should now read 3, 0, 1, 1, 1 across and 1, 2, 1, 0, 2 down, exactly matching the published numbers.
Six clean ship actions (three for the cruiser, two for the destroyer, one for the submarine) are all you need. The score updates the moment the validator confirms the fleet.
Scoring, Controls, and the Boss Key
The score starts at 1,000 and decreases by 10 for every ship-placement action you make. Adding a segment costs 10; removing a mis-placed segment costs another 10. Water marks and arrow-key moves do not affect the score. A perfect run of six ship actions ends at 1,000 - 6 x 10 = 940, the maximum score for this board.
The keyboard map is deliberately small so the puzzle stays quick to pick up:
- Arrow keys: move the cursor one cell in any direction; out-of-bounds moves are ignored.
- Space: add or remove a ship segment on the highlighted cell.
- Enter: add or remove an optional water mark on the highlighted cell.
- Escape (double-press): show the shared simulated spreadsheet boss cover; press Escape twice more to return to the unchanged fleet.
Mouse and touch users can click a cell to toggle a ship segment and use the context-menu gesture to mark water. The board is rendered as semantic buttons inside a responsive CSS grid, not as a canvas, so every cell is selectable, focusable, and screen-reader friendly. There is no timer, no audio, no downloaded image, and no account. Your best score on this puzzle is stored only in your browser's localStorage.
If you reach a contradiction, such as a bent ship, a fleet length that does not match 1, 2, 3, or two ships touching diagonally, the validator surfaces the problem and lets you keep editing. Press the restart control to clear ships, water marks, score, moves, and contradiction state and start the board again.
Other Fixed Logic Puzzles on the Same Grid Style
Battleships sits in a family of single-player logic puzzles where the rules are small but the deductions are sharp. If the strict no-touch rule appealed to you, Tents Puzzle uses a similar no-diagonal-contact rule to pair trees with tents. If you enjoy matching every line clue, Heyawake Puzzle shades one cell per room while preserving a connected white area. And if straight shapes are your thing, Thermometers Puzzle applies bulb-first fills across a fixed set of straight shapes until every row and column clue matches. Each of those is the same flavour of reasoning as Battleships: small rules and a fixed board built around the published clues.