Battleship Glossary
The words below are used in the rules, the strategy guides and the game itself. They are explained the way this version of Battleship uses them.
The board and the fleet
Grid: the 10×10 square of water. Columns run A to J and rows run 1 to 10, so a cell is written like C4.
Fleet: the five ships every player hides: Carrier (5 cells), Battleship (4), Cruiser (3), Submarine (3) and Destroyer (2), 17 cells in total.
Defense grid: your own waters, showing your ships and the shots the enemy has fired at them. Fire grid: the enemy waters, where you record your shots.
Re-deploy: rearranging your own ships by hand before the first shot is fired.
Shots and results
Shot: firing at one cell of the enemy grid.
Hit: the shot struck part of a ship. A hit lets the same player fire again.
Miss: the shot landed in empty water. The turn passes to the opponent.
Sunk: every cell of a ship has been hit. Its outline is revealed and its cells can be ruled out for further search.
Accuracy: hits divided by shots, shown on the result card.
Search tactics
Hunt mode: searching for the first hit of a new ship when no hit is waiting to be finished.
Target mode: after a hit, firing around it until the ship sinks.
Parity scan (checkerboard): firing at every other cell. Because the smallest ship covers two cells, it always touches both colours of the checkerboard.
Probability density (heat map): counting, for every cell, how many legal ship placements would cover it, then firing at the highest count. The built-in AI works this way.
Axis: the direction, horizontal or vertical, shown by two hits in a row. Locking onto the axis means following that line to both ends.
Modes and features
Solo game: a game against the AI that starts as soon as the page opens. It is saved after every shot, so a refresh restores it.
Daily Challenge: a solo game whose enemy fleet is built from the calendar date, the same for every player. The score is the number of shots; fewer is better.
Play with Friends: a private room reached by a link. A friend can watch your solo game and, once they tap Ready, you can switch into a 1v1 match.
Room code: the six-character code that identifies a friend room. Share the link rather than the code if you can.
Spectating: watching a friend's game. A spectator sees only what the players see, never the position of an unsunk ship.