Hidden Armada: placing and finding the fleet
In Hidden Armada, the first player to sink the opposing fleet wins. Two different skills matter: placing your own ships in a legal, hard-to-read pattern and changing your search method after the first hit.
| Ship length | 4 cells | 3 cells | 2 cells | 1 cell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of ships | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Ten ships in total. No two ships may touch, even at a corner.
Place ships without trapping yourself
Your ten ships consist of one four-cell ship, two three-cell ships, three two-cell ships and four single-cell ships. Each lies in a straight line. Ships cannot touch along an edge or even at a corner, so place the largest one first and leave water around it. Fill the remaining space with smaller ships afterwards.
Placing the small ships first can split the board into spaces where the four-cell ship no longer fits. Before confirming, inspect the whole fleet rather than only the ship you just placed.
Use two firing modes
Before any hit, search. A checkerboard pattern, testing every other square, helps find ships longer than one cell without firing at every square. It will not find every single-cell ship, but it can locate larger targets sooner.
After a hit, change the task: check neighbouring squares, determine whether the ship is horizontal or vertical and continue along that line. A hit grants another shot. Scattering shots randomly at this point wastes that advantage.
After sinking a ship
The water around a sunk ship is marked automatically because no other ship could legally occupy those cells. Skip them in later searches. If only single-cell ships remain, return to the squares skipped by the checkerboard pattern; that method does not cover isolated cells.