The Battleships Puzzle at Lizely is a free, browser-based, keyboard-driven logic game built on a 5×5 grid where you place a three-ship fleet so that every row and column clue matches exactly. Unlike the classic two-player guessing game where hidden ships are revealed shot by shot, every decision here is visible on a single open grid, which means you solve the whole fleet placement as a pure logic puzzle. You work with one disclosed fleet: a length-3 cruiser, a length-2 destroyer, and a length-1 submarine that together occupy six of the twenty-five cells. Each ship must sit on a straight line, ships cannot touch each other even at a corner, and the printed totals along every row and every column restrict exactly where the segments can land. With arrow-key movement, Space for ship cells, Enter for personal water marks, and a score that starts at 1,000 and loses ten points for every ship action you make, the whole challenge compresses into a small but precise solvable fixture you can finish in a single sitting.
What Sets This Battleship Puzzle Apart from the Two-Player Game
The two-player guessing game and the battleship puzzle online free game you find at Lizely share a name, a fleet, and a grid pattern, but they solve completely different problems. In the guessing game, ships are hidden, you fire at coordinates one at a time, and "hit or miss" feedback drives the next move. Here, the board shows every ship cell as you place it, the row and column totals are visible from the start, and the constraint is deterministic logic rather than luck or memory. There is no opponent, no salvo, and no guessing phase; the entire puzzle is a single open grid with a single unique fleet.
That structural difference is what lets the puzzle survive without a clock, an account, an audio cue, or a download. Everything you need to solve it lives in the disclosed fleet, the row clues (3, 0, 1, 1, 1) and the column clues (1, 2, 1, 0, 2). Add up all five row clues and you get exactly six occupied cells, the same total reached by adding all five column clues. That redundancy is not a coincidence; it is the puzzle's self-checking arithmetic. If placements satisfy the row clues (3, 0, 1, 1, 1), the row counts equal those clue values and sum to 6 regardless of column matching; if placements satisfy the column clues, total cells are 6 so row counts must also sum to 6.
Inside the 5×5 Grid: Fleet, Clues, and Constraints
The disclosed fleet on this Lizely fixture contains one ship of length 3, one ship of length 2, and one ship of length 1, occupying six cells total. The remaining nineteen cells stay as water. The row clues run from top to bottom as 3, 0, 1, 1, and 1, so the second row is forced to be entirely water and the top row must hold three ship cells. The column clues run from left to right as 1, 2, 1, 0, and 2, so the fourth column is forced to be entirely water and the second and fifth columns must each hold two ship cells.
Every ship has to be a straight horizontal or vertical line and ships may never touch, not by an edge and not diagonally. This separation rule is the trickiest part for new players, because the surrounding water cells of one ship form a forbidden ring that must stay empty of any other ship's segments. Cross-checking column 4 being entirely water with row 2 being entirely water shows the puzzle's logical skeleton immediately: those forced rows and columns lock down where the rest of the fleet can sit.
| Constraint | Requirement on the 5×5 Board |
|---|---|
| Fleet sizes | One ship of length 3, one of length 2, one of length 1 |
| Total ship cells | Six occupied cells, nineteen water cells |
| Orientation | Each ship is a straight horizontal or vertical line only |
| Separation | No edge contact and no corner contact between any two ships |
| Row clues | Match the sequence 3, 0, 1, 1, 1 from top to bottom |
| Column clues | Match the sequence 1, 2, 1, 0, 2 from left to right |
How to Play Battleship Puzzle Online Step by Step
- Open the Battleships Puzzle in any modern browser; the page renders the 5×5 board immediately with row clues along one edge and column clues along another.
- Use the arrow keys to move the keyboard cursor across the grid. Each cell announces its row, column, ship status, water mark, and selection state to assistive software.
- Press Space at any cell to add a ship segment; press Space again on a ship cell to remove it. Every Space action counts as a ship action in the score, so hesitation costs you ten points per toggle.
- Press Enter on an empty cell to set or clear an optional water mark. Water marks are pure reasoning aids and do not affect the validator, the row totals, or the score.
- Build one straight ship of length 3, one straight ship of length 2, and one straight ship of length 1. A connected group that spans more than one row and one column is a bent ship and is rejected.
- Confirm that no two ships touch edge-to-edge or corner-to-corner. Diagonal contact between ships from different connected groups is the most common way to lose the validator.
- Verify the row clues from top to bottom add up across the grid (3, 0, 1, 1, 1) and the column clues from left to right add up the same way (1, 2, 1, 0, 2).
- Reach the disclosed solution for a clean 940-point finish, or restart the board to clear ships, water marks, score, and any contradiction state.
Scoring, Restart, and Built-In Tools
The board begins each session at 1,000 points, and the score updates using the formula max(0, 1000 − 10 × ship actions). Working that through for the disclosed solution gives the worked example for this board:
Starting score = 1,000 Ship actions needed = 6 Penalty = 10 × 6 = 60 Final score = max(0, 1,000 − 60) = 940
That is the cleanest path: six Space actions on the right six cells, with zero backtracking. If you toggle a cell on and then off again, every extra Space action lowers the final score by another ten points. Best scores are kept locally in your browser's localStorage, so no account is required and nothing is uploaded.
Restart clears ships, water marks, score, move count, and any contradiction indicator. Double-press Escape and the board swaps to a shared simulated spreadsheet cover, and double-press Escape again to return to the fleet exactly as you left it. There is no timer, no random service, no downloaded image, no audio, no hardware dependency, and no pointer-only interaction. You can click to toggle a ship segment, use a context-menu gesture to mark water, or stay entirely on the keyboard.
Where Battleships Comes From as a Logic Puzzle
The logic-puzzle version of Battleships, with its printed row and column totals and its no-touch rule, sits alongside other published grid puzzles that turn naval imagery into deduction. Conceptis, the specialist puzzle publisher, hosts the standard Battleships rules reference that defines the fleet, the straight-ship constraint, and the corner separation. The compact 5×5 fixture, the printed clue values, the disclosed solution, and the controls are specific choices made for Lizely, while the broader rule shape (straight ships, no diagonal contact, fleet counts, line totals) is independently described by Games Magazine's battleships coverage. Together those references give the puzzle a stable, well-known rule set rather than a one-off design.
For other deterministic single-player logic puzzles on the same grid family, related options include Stitches, Thermometers, and Tents, all of which use clue totals and adjacency rules to constrain a single unambiguous solution.
When the Validator Says No
The validator runs in real time after every ship action. It groups orthogonally adjacent occupied cells into connected components, checks that every component is a straight line, compares the sorted component lengths against the declared fleet of one, two, and three, and scans every diagonal neighbor across different components. If any component bends, exceeds the largest declared ship, or touches another ship diagonally, the action produces a contradiction. The board also rejects line totals higher than the printed clue, more than six total ship cells, and any input aimed at a cell that does not exist. Because the rules reject wrong shapes one move at a time, the cleanest way to clear a contradiction is to undo the most recent Space action with another Space on the same cell, then rebuild the affected ship with both straightness and separation in mind.
That visible feedback turns the puzzle into a self-teaching loop: every mistaken ship placement is corrected almost immediately, and the disclosed solution remains reachable through other layouts once the row 2 and column 4 water-only lines are honored, the top row's three occupied cells are fixed, and the second and fifth columns each get their two segments without touching the others.
For a deeper look, see Binairo Daily Puzzle: One Fixed 6×6 Board, One Solution.
For a deeper look, see How to Play Binary Decoder Game: 5 Rounds to 1,000 Points.