Hunt the enemy fleet on an 8×8 grid while the AI hunts yours — sink all four ships before they sink you.
Top grid is the enemy ocean — tap any cell to fire a shot. A red X means hit, a gray dot means miss. The bottom grid is your fleet; the AI's shots appear there each turn. Sink all four enemy ships (lengths 4, 3, 3, 2) before the AI sinks yours.
Ships never touch each other, not even diagonally. Scoring: 50 points per hit. A win adds 300, plus 40 for every cell of your own fleet still afloat, plus 10 for every shot you didn't need out of the 64 cells.
Search in a checkerboard. The smallest ship has length 2, so it must touch at least one cell in any diagonal pattern. Firing only on cells where (row + column) is even halves your shots in the search phase and never misses a possible ship — switch to dense sweeping only after you score a hit.
Follow the axis after the second hit. Two adjacent hits define the ship's orientation, so all further shots should extend along that line. Probing perpendicular cells once you know the axis is wasted ammo and gives the AI free turns.
Reserve the corners for late. A corner cell can be covered by only two ship placements per ship (one horizontal, one vertical), while a central cell can be covered by up to twice the ship's length in each direction — so corners are statistically the worst opening guess. Sweep the open middle rows first, then close in on edges; the corners usually fall on their own when surrounding cells are eliminated. Ships never touch, so every cell next to a sunk ship — diagonals included — is empty water you can skip.
Track what's left mentally. After a sink, count the remaining enemy ship lengths (4, 3, 3, 2 minus whatever you've killed). If only the 4 is alive, any clump of fewer than 4 contiguous unshot cells is impossible — skip it and aim at long stretches instead.