Sea Battle — Battleship Online With Friends (September 2026)

Sea Battle is battleship online as a Telegram duel — the pen-and-paper sea battle, for two players with a friend. Each side gets a 7×7 board and a fleet of four ships — 4, 3, 2 and 2 cells long. Take turns firing at your opponent's waters; a hit or a sink lets you fire again, and the first player to sink the whole enemy fleet takes the pot, 1.90× their stake. Luck decides where the first hit lands. After that, the player who hunts better usually wins.

How to play Sea Battle

1. Open Sea Battle in the Games hub. Launch Gift Club inside Telegram, open Games and pick Sea Battle from the Play with friends row.
2. Pick a stake and an opponent. Stakes are 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 Stars, or 0 in free mode. Send a challenge link to a friend in any Telegram chat, or play the bot straight away.
3. Place your fleet, then press Ready. Your fleet is dealt for you. Drag a ship to move it, tap it to turn it, or shuffle up to 5 times for a new layout, then press Ready. You have 45 seconds; if time runs out you are readied on the fleet you are looking at.
4. Fire, and keep firing while you hit. Tap a cell of the enemy board within 12 seconds. A miss hands the turn over; a hit or a sink lets you fire again. The very first turn of the battle is one shot only, even on a hit.
5. Sink all four ships. A sunk ship reveals the water around it. The first player to sink the whole enemy fleet wins both stakes less a 5% rake.

Sea Battle payouts

Sea Battle pros and cons

A sea battle game cut down to a Telegram session

The paper game most of us grew up with is a big grid, ten ships and a long evening. Sea Battle keeps the rules that make it work — straight ships that never touch, a hit that earns another shot, a sunk ship that gives away the water around it — and shrinks the board until a match fits in a coffee break.

• A 7×7 board and four ships. 11 of the 49 cells hold a ship, so the hunt is real, and a match between two average players runs a median 41 shots.
• Ships never touch. Not side by side, not at a corner. That rule is what makes sinking a ship so valuable: every cell around it has to be water.
• A hit keeps your turn. Hits come in chains — 1.8 shots on average, and the longest simulated chain was 11.
• No turn cap. Every shot resolves a new cell, so a match cannot run past 98 shots.

Dealt fleets, the shuffle and moving ships by hand

Your fleet arrives dealt from the match's server seed, committed before either player sees a board, and each shuffle moves you to the next layout that seed already fixed. To place a ship yourself, drag it to a new spot or tap it to turn it — ships still may not touch. You get up to 5 shuffles, as many moves as you like and 45 seconds, then press Ready. Hidden placement is where a naval game could be cheated, so every fleet is locked when the battle starts: a dealt one replays from the revealed seed, and one placed by hand is pinned by a fingerprint both players see from the first shot.

A shuffle does not make you safer on average — every dealt layout follows the same rules. Use it to get away from a fleet you dislike, for instance one with ships crowded along an edge you tend to hunt first.

Hunt and target

Good play has two modes. Hunting is searching for a ship; targeting is finishing one you have hit. The simulation that set this board found that a strong player who does both beats a player firing at random 99.9% of the time, and beats an average player 67.4% of the time.

1. After a first hit, try the four neighbours. A ship is straight, so the rest of it is up, down, left or right of the hit.
2. After a second hit, stay on the line. Two hits in a row give you the direction. Keep firing along it at both ends until the ship sinks.
3. Cross off the diagonals. Because ships never touch, the four diagonal neighbours of any hit are water. Never fire there.
4. Finish before you hunt again. A wounded ship is the cheapest target on the board. The bot never walks away from one, and neither should you.

Checkerboard hunting for the smallest ships

Color the board like a chessboard. Every ship is at least 2 cells long, so every ship covers at least one cell of each color. Firing only at the 24 cells of the smaller color is guaranteed to touch every ship at least once — you never need the other 25 cells to find a ship, only to finish it.

Once both 2-cell ships are sunk, the smallest ship left is at least 3 cells long, and you can space your hunting shots further apart. Aim for open stretches where the ships still afloat actually fit: a gap of 2 cells between known water cannot hold the 4-cell ship.

Using the halo

A sunk ship reveals every cell around it as water — about 32 cells per match, counting both boards. That is free information, and it compounds: the revealed water splits the board into smaller open areas, and a small area that cannot hold any ship still afloat is empty too. Before each hunting shot, ask which of the remaining ships could still fit there.

Why the first turn is one shot

Who fires first is drawn from the committed seed. Firing first is an edge, because a hit chain can start before your opponent has taken a single shot. So the very first turn of the battle is one shot only, even on a hit. With that rule the first mover wins 52.3% of matches between two strong players and 51.7% between two average ones — close to a coin flip, without changing how any other turn plays.

The clock and missed turns

Each shot has a 12-second clock, and a hit restarts it. Let it run out and a random shot is fired for you at a cell nobody has fired at — and that shot never keeps the turn, even when it hits. Two lapses in a row are covered that way; the third in a row forfeits the match and the pot. Only a shot you fire yourself resets the count.

The rake, and what it leaves the winner

Both players stake the same amount, the pot is doubled, and 5% goes to the house. The winner collects 1.90× their own stake at every tier — 19 Stars at 10, 190 at 100. At 5 Stars the exact figure is 9.5, settled to 9 or 10 by a rounding draw weighted so the average is exact.

Between two equal players that is a 95% long-run return, the same margin the solo games carry. Unlike a payout table, though, a rake is flat: a player who wins noticeably more than half their matches keeps that edge. Online games for money goes through the difference.

Provably fair fleets

Every dealt layout either side could shuffle to, who fires first and the payout rounding draw all come from one server seed committed before the match. Each side's layouts use their own input, so neither can be worked out from the other. A fleet moved by hand is its player's own choice: when the battle starts, both players see a fingerprint of each fleet keyed by that seed, so no ship can move afterwards without the fingerprint changing. After a finished match the seed is revealed: dealt fleets replay, and hand-placed ones match their fingerprints. The one thing outside the commitment is where a missed turn's random shot lands, which no player chooses anyway. Provably fair verification shows how to check a finished round.

Sea Battle or another duel?

• Want the most skill: Sea Battle. Where you fire is the whole game.
• Want dice and decisions in about a minute: PvP Ludo — two dice per roll, and you use one.
• Want one repeated choice: PvP Balloon Pump — one balloon, one to three pumps a turn.
• Want a pure 50/50: PvP Minefield or PvP Dice Duel. Neither has anything to play well, and both settle fast.

Sea Battle FAQ