No, a ship cannot bend in the Battleships Puzzle — every connected ship must form a single uninterrupted horizontal or vertical line, and any component that spans more than one row and more than one column is automatically rejected as a bent ship before the board is accepted. This is the single most common rule that catches first-time players, because the same word "ship" is used in the two-player guessing game where the silhouette is hidden and in this solitaire logic puzzle where the silhouette is the only thing you are building. In this puzzle, "ship" refers strictly to a straight run of occupied cells, and the validator enforces that shape as a hard constraint rather than a soft hint. Understanding why bending is forbidden, and exactly how the validator tests for it, is the difference between a completed 940-point run and a board stuck in contradiction state with the wrong fleet shape.
What the straight-ship rule actually forbids
The Battleships Puzzle disclosed fleet is one cruiser of length 3, one destroyer of length 2, and one submarine of length 1, occupying six cells in total on the five by five grid. Each of those ships must be a straight horizontal or vertical run, and no ship can turn a corner, hook back on itself, or zigzag through the grid. The internal implementation is straightforward: after every Space press, the solver breadth-first groups every orthogonally adjacent occupied cell into connected components, then checks that each component is collinear. A component that lives in only one row or only one column is a legal straight ship. A component that lives in more than one row and more than one column is, by definition, bent, and the board flips into contradiction state with no completion.
This is why you cannot "fix" a partially placed ship by adding one more segment in a new direction — the moment two segments share a side but point along different axes, the component is no longer a line. A length-3 ship that goes right twice and then down once is no longer a single ship, because the whole shape spans two rows and two columns. A length-2 ship placed diagonally is not two segments of one ship; it is two isolated single cells, which is also rejected because the sorted fleet must match [1, 2, 3] exactly. The validator's length check is equally strict: any component longer than the largest declared ship is rejected, so a four-segment run in any direction also fails.
The same collinearity check is what makes an L-shaped segment pair a contradiction on its own. Two segments that meet at right angles count as one bent component, which is already enough to reject the board on its own, since the validator groups orthogonally adjacent cells into a single component. Either way, completion is impossible until every occupied cell folds back into a single, straight, axis-aligned run.
The five by five grid, the clues, and the disclosed solution
The board is a fixed five by five grid, not a randomly generated puzzle. The row clues, from top to bottom, are 3, 0, 1, 1, and 1. The column clues, from left to right, are 1, 2, 1, 0, and 2. Every row and every column must contain exactly the printed number of ship segments, and the rest are water. The disclosed solution occupies the zero-based cells 0, 1, 2, 14, 19, and 21. The first three cells form the length-3 cruiser running across the top row from column 0 to column 2. Cells 14 and 19 form the length-2 destroyer running vertically in the last column from row 2 down to row 3. Cell 21 is the isolated submarine, sitting on its own at (row 4, column 1).
That arrangement is straight, distinct, and self-consistent. The destroyer and the submarine sit in the same column but they are not adjacent, so they do not fold into one bent ship. The top row's cruiser never touches the destroyer or the submarine, even diagonally. The row and column clues are matched exactly: the top row contains 3 ship segments, the second row contains 0, and so on. This is the disclosed arrangement that satisfies every constraint at once, and once you see it, the straight-ship rule stops feeling like a wall and starts feeling like the spine of the puzzle.
| Constraint | Rule | What it forbids |
|---|---|---|
| Ship shape | One straight horizontal or vertical line per component | Any component that spans more than one row and more than one column |
| Ship length | Sorted lengths must equal [1, 2, 3] | Components longer than 3 or missing one of the declared sizes |
| Ship separation | No edge or corner contact between distinct ships | Any ship segment whose diagonal neighbor belongs to a different component |
| Row clues | Row counts must match 3, 0, 1, 1, 1 | Any row that exceeds its printed total |
| Column clues | Column counts must match 1, 2, 1, 0, 2 | Any column that exceeds its printed total |
| Total cells | Exactly six occupied cells | Any seventh ship segment anywhere on the board |
How to place the fleet without bending
- Move the active cell around the grid with the arrow keys, and press Space on each cell where you want to commit a ship segment. Press Enter on an unoccupied cell to drop an optional water mark for your own reasoning — water marks do not count toward the fleet and never affect the score. Mouse and touch users can click to toggle a ship segment and use the context-menu gesture to mark water on the same grid.
- Start with the length-3 cruiser across the top row, occupying columns 0, 1, and 2. Press Space at (row 0, column 0), then (row 0, column 1), then (row 0, column 2). These three segments share edges and live in a single row, so they form one straight, valid component that satisfies the shape check the moment the third Space is pressed.
- Place the length-2 destroyer vertically in the last column. Move down to (row 2, column 4) and press Space, then move down to (row 3, column 4) and press Space again. Those two segments live in a single column and form a second straight component, distinct from the cruiser because the entire row 1 between them stays empty.
- Drop the length-1 submarine at (row 4, column 1). Press Space once. This isolated cell is its own component of length 1, and it is the only single-cell ship the fleet defines.
- Confirm the no-touch rule visually. The destroyer at (2, 4) and (3, 4) must not share an edge or a corner with the cruiser at (0, 0) through (0, 2) or with the submarine at (4, 1). The cell (1, 3) sits diagonally between the cruiser and the destroyer, and (3, 0), (3, 1), (3, 2), (4, 0), and (4, 2) stay empty around the submarine, so the diagonal gaps hold on every side.
- Verify that the row clues from top to bottom read 3, 0, 1, 1, 1 and the column clues from left to right read 1, 2, 1, 0, 2. With the fleet placed, the top row holds 3, the second row holds 0, the third row holds 1, the fourth row holds 1, and the bottom row holds 1, while the column counts are 1, 2, 1, 0, and 2 in order.
Six clean Space actions complete the board for 940 points from a starting score of 1,000, because the score formula is max(0, 1000 − 10 × ship actions). Each Space press that adds or removes a ship segment is a ship action, so the fastest keyboard route also produces the best score. Restart clears ships, water marks, score, moves, and contradiction state, so you can reset to a clean grid any time you want to retry the run. A completed best score may be stored only in localStorage, so results stay on your own device rather than on a server.
Why diagonal contact is rejected alongside bending
The straight-ship rule and the no-touch rule work together, because both are checked on the same component graph. The validator scans the diagonal neighbors of every ship segment, and if a diagonal neighbor belongs to a different component, the two ships are touching by a corner and the board is rejected. That is why surrounding cells around every ship are water, not just the orthogonal neighbors. The disclosed solution exploits this: the cruiser sits in the top row across columns 0 through 2, the destroyer runs vertically through column 4 in rows 2 and 3, and the submarine sits alone in column 1 at row 4, so surrounding cells around every ship stay empty on all eight sides.
Validation recalculates connected components after every ship action, so the moment you place a segment that bends a component or that brings two components into diagonal contact, the contradiction is visible immediately. The same test catches a deliberate diagonal collision, so an L-shaped segment pair is rejected as both a bent component and a diagonal contact between subcomponents, depending on how it is placed. The board also rejects out-of-range logic input explicitly, so an invalid cell index never silently corrupts the run. Line totals may not exceed their printed clues, the board cannot contain more than six ship cells, and any of these failures puts the board into contradiction state rather than quietly accepting a partial placement.
What changes when the board is in contradiction state
Contradiction state means the current fleet placement violates at least one of the rules above: a bent component, a diagonal contact, a row or column total above its clue, more than six ship cells, or a sorted fleet that no longer matches [1, 2, 3]. The board stays interactive, so you can undo the offending segment with another Space press and try a different position. Water marks, by contrast, are personal reasoning aids and do not alter the fleet validator or score, so a misplaced Enter mark will never put the board into contradiction state on its own. The board uses semantic buttons in a responsive CSS grid rather than a canvas, and every cell announces its row, column, ship, water, and keyboard-selection state for accessibility.
Completion requires the full fleet contract at the same time: all five row clues, all five column clues, the exact sorted fleet, six ship cells, nineteen water cells, no bending, and no diagonal contact. Matching only the total number of occupied cells is not enough, because a wrong fleet shape can still happen to fill six cells and still fail the collinearity check on at least one component. The fastest route is the disclosed solution above, which is what the automated tests assert as the canonical six-segment keyboard simulation that ends on 940 points. There is no timer, random service, downloaded image, account, audio, or hardware dependency, so the only variable is how cleanly you place the fleet.
Double-press Escape for the shared simulated spreadsheet boss cover, and repeat the gesture to return to the unchanged fleet underneath. None of these surfaces, borders, focus treatments, warnings, or ship colors rely on anything outside the page itself, so a single keyboard session is enough to take a placement from a 1,000-point starting score down to a clean 940-point completion.
Related logic puzzles with similar straight-shape contracts
Other fixed logic puzzles on Lizely use a comparable "no bend, no touch" contract. Stitches joins every neighboring region pair exactly once while matching row and column endpoint clues, Thermometers sets continuous bulb-first fluid levels across eight thermometers, Tents pairs trees with tents while keeping all tents apart including diagonally, and Heyawake shades exactly one cell in each room while preserving a connected white area. Each of those is a good next step once the straight-ship rule in the Battleships Puzzle feels natural, because every one of them rewards the same habit of treating shape as a hard constraint instead of a guideline.