Player's manual · rev D · Final
OceanBattle
Hide your fleet. Hunt theirs. Sink every enemy ship before they sink yours — and at the end, see exactly where they were hiding.
Object of the game
Each player has a fleet of ships hidden on their own grid. You take turns firing at squares on your opponent's grid, trying to find and sink their ships. You can't see where their ships are — you fire blind and learn from what you hit.
Sink your opponent's entire fleet before they sink yours, and you win. When the last ship goes down, both fleets are revealed, so you finally see where everything was.
Quick start
The short version. The rest of the manual just fills in detail.
- Power on. Both consoles show the title screen. Whoever presses the dial first is the host for this game.
- Host picks the battle. The host chooses a board size and, if they want, changes the rules. (See sections 03 and 08.)
- Each player places a fleet. Pick auto or manual placement on your own console, set your ships, and choose Ready. (Section 04.)
- Host fires first. Take turns firing. A hit turns red, a miss turns green. (Sections 05–06.)
- Win by sinking everything. Sink the enemy's last ship and the fleets are revealed. (Section 07.)
Choose your battle
The host picks one of four board sizes. Think of it this way: board size sets how long the game runs; the fleet sets how hard it is to find ships. Bigger board, longer game. 10×10 is the classic game.
| Board | Ships | Ship cells | Feel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 × 6 | 3 | 7 | Quick skirmish |
| 8 × 8 | 4 | 12 | A full game, faster |
| 10 × 10 | 5 | 17 | The classic |
| 12 × 12 | 8 | 29 | The big one — try Salvo |
The fleet
Eight ships exist. Which ones you get depends on the board size — a dot means that ship is in play at that size.
| Ship | Size | 6×6 | 8×8 | 10×10 | 12×12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mega Carrier | 6 | — | — | — | ● |
| AntiSub Cruiser | 5 | — | — | ● | ● |
| Battleship | 4 | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Frigate | 4 | — | — | — | ● |
| Submarine | 3 | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Destroyer | 3 | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Patrol Boat | 2 | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Torpedo Boat | 2 | ● | — | — | ● |
Place your fleet
After the host locks the board size, each console asks how you want to place ships. You choose on your own console — so one player can place by hand while the other lets the game do it.
Auto placement
The game lays out a legal fleet for you, shown in white on the grid. Choose Shuffle for a different layout, or OK to accept. You can still adjust an auto layout — press any ship to lift it and move it before you commit.
Placing by hand
Turn the dial to pick a ship, then press the grid cells it should fill. A few simple rules:
- Ships go in a straight line — all in one row or one column, no bends.
- No gaps, and the number of cells must match the ship's length.
- Pressed a cell by mistake? Press it again to clear it.
- Placed a ship in the wrong spot? Press it to lift it back out and try again.
The screen tells you if something's wrong — for example SHIPS MUST BE IN A STRAIGHT LINE — and won't let you confirm until the ship is valid. When every ship is placed, choose Ready. Your console shows STAND BY FOR OTHER PLAYER until both fleets are in.
A selection pulses white until it's legal, then turns solid white once placed. Full colour reference in section 05.
If the host turned off Ships Can Touch, your ships can't sit next to each other — not even at the corners. Any non-standard rules are listed on the placement screen, so glance at it before you set your fleet.
Reading the board
The grid does two jobs and swaps between them each turn. On your turn it's your firing board — your shots at the enemy. On their turn it shows your own fleet so you can watch where they're aiming.
The easy tell: white only ever appears on your own fleet. If you see white on the grid, it isn't your turn to fire. The screen also always names what you're looking at — YOUR SHOTS or YOUR FLEET.
Every colour and pattern the grid shows, start to finish — placing ships and firing on them both:
Hits are bright, water and misses are dim — so the squares that matter jump out at a glance, and hit-versus-miss stays clear even if red and green are hard to tell apart.
Taking your turn
Firing is a deliberate two-press action, so a stray touch never wastes a shot.
- Aim. Press a cell. It flashes yellow — this is armed, not fired. You're pointing, not shooting.
- Fire. Press the same cell again to shoot. The cell blinks yellow fast while the firing sound plays, then reveals the result — red for a hit, green for a miss. The pause is deliberate: the sound lands before the reveal, so every shot has a beat of suspense.
A few things worth knowing:
- A stray press only cancels your aim. If you press any other cell while aiming, it just clears the yellow — it never fires. Press again to re-aim. You can lose your aim to a bump, but never a shot.
- You have about five seconds to fire before the aim fades on its own. Pressing the dial also cancels it.
- You can't fire the same square twice. Press an already-fired cell and you get a quick flash and
ALREADY FIRED— nothing happens.
When your shot lands, your opponent sees the same square light up on their fleet at the same instant. Then the turn passes — unless a rule says otherwise (see section 08).
With sound on, every animation runs for exactly as long as its sound: a ten-second missile launch blinks yellow for the full ten seconds before the reveal, a five-second explosion blinks red for five. Swap in a shorter clip and the animation shortens to match. With the volume off, the game switches to quick fixed beats instead, so a muted game plays fast — turning the sound off is the fast-play path. Either way a shot plays all the way through; there's no skip.
Sinking & winning
Hit every cell of a ship and it sinks. By default the game names the ship that went down — YOU SANK THEIR DESTROYER — which tells you what's still out there. (The host can turn that off; see section 08.)
Sink the enemy's entire fleet to win. The moment their last ship goes down, the game ends and both fleets are revealed on both consoles — including the ships you never even found. Seeing where everything was hiding is half the fun.
After the game
The host picks what's next:
- New Game — same rules, place fresh fleets.
- Back to Title — start over from scratch, including who hosts.
Rules & options
Five optional rules, set by the host before the game. They change the pace and difficulty — you can leave them all at default for the classic game.
| Rule | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Hit — Fire Again | Off | Land a hit and you fire again, and keep going as long as you keep hitting. Games run shorter and a hot streak can be brutal. |
| Salvo | Off | Each turn you fire one shot per surviving ship, all called before any results come back. As you lose ships you fire fewer shots — so the leader pulls ahead fast. Great on big boards. |
| One-Hit Sink | Off | Any single hit sinks the whole ship. Fast and luck-driven — finding a ship is the same as killing it. |
| Ships Can Touch | On | Turn off and ships may not touch, not even at the corners. Harder to hide a fleet and harder to hunt one. |
| Announce Ship Sunk | On | Turn off and you're never told anything sank, so a sink sounds and looks the same as a hit. Much harder as you can't work out what lengths are left when ships are grouped. |
Salvo and Hit — Fire Again can't both be on — a whole extra volley for every hit would snowball out of control. When Salvo is on, Hit — Fire Again is greyed out.
Playing solo
You can play against the computer with a single console. Every board size and every rule works exactly the same as a two-player game.
The computer fires at random until it lands a hit, then works around that hit to finish the ship before going back to searching — so it plays a fair, honest game rather than cheating with knowledge of your fleet.