Jahaz Jung

Play Jahaz Jung

Players

1 or 2: the computer, a friend on one device, a friend or rival online, or the Daily Fleet alone

Modes

Classic or Russian fleets, ships apart or touching, one shot, streak or salvo, and a quick 8 by 8 ocean

Levels

Easy, Medium and Hard computers, each shown with how it plays

Fairness

The computer's fleet is sealed with SHA-256 before your first shot and checked at the end

Developer

Classic Games

Works on

Phone, tablet and computer browsers. Nothing to install.

Released

October 2026

• Board
• Multiplayer
• Strategy
• Sea battle
• 2 player
• Vs computer
• Online

Jahaz Jung is the classic sea battle, the pencil and paper game that sailors and schoolchildren have played for more than a hundred years. Jahaz means ship and jung means battle. Each side hides a fleet on a grid, and the players take turns calling out squares to fire at. Every shot is answered miss, hit or sunk, and the first player to sink the whole enemy fleet wins.

Play the computer at three levels, pass one phone between two people with a curtain that hides each fleet, invite a friend to an online room with a code or a link, or join a quick match. Every day there is also a Daily Fleet: the same hidden fleet for every player, scored by how few shots you need, with a par set by the hard computer.

The game is built to be fair and easy to read. The computer only ever sees its own shots, and its fleet is sealed before your first shot, so you can check at the end that it never moved a ship. Misses, hits and sunk ships use different shapes as well as colours, the squares stay large on a phone, and the whole game plays with a keyboard or a screen reader too.

How to play the sea battle

1. Choose a mode: the computer, pass and play, an online room or the Daily Fleet. The Rules card switches between the Classic and Russian fleets and the other family rules.
2. Place your fleet: drag each ship onto your ocean, tap a placed ship to turn it, or press Random. With the standard rules ships keep one square apart, even at the corners.
3. Press Ready. A coin toss decides who fires first, and the screen tells you who won it.
4. On your turn, pick a square on Enemy waters. On a phone the first tap aims and the second tap fires; with a mouse one click fires.
5. Each shot is answered with a splash for a miss, a blast for a hit, or the whole ship drawn as a wreck when it sinks. Around a sunk ship the empty water gets a small ring.
6. With the standard rules the turn then passes to the other side. With Hit fires again you keep shooting while you hit, and with Salvo you fire one shot for each of your ships still afloat.
7. Sink every ship of the other fleet to win. The end screen shows both fleets, your shots, hits and accuracy, and a Replay of the whole game.

Controls

Drag ships to place them and tap a ship to turn it, or use Random. Tap a square to aim and tap it again to fire, or press Fire; Settings has one-tap firing. With a mouse, click a square to fire. On a keyboard, arrow keys move the aim and Enter or Space fires; in setup, arrows move, R turns a ship and Enter places it.

A computer you can check

Many players suspect that a computer opponent peeks at their ships. In Jahaz Jung it cannot: its code only receives its own shots and their answers. Before your first shot, its fleet is written down with a secret salt and turned into a SHA-256 fingerprint, shown as the Fleet seal. When the game ends, the fleet and the salt are revealed, the game checks the fingerprint again and replays every one of your shots against the revealed fleet, and you can copy the text into any SHA-256 tool to check it yourself.

See what the computer saw

Replay steps through every shot with both fleets showing. For each shot it shows the likelihood map that the hard computer uses, so you can see why it fired where it did, and it rates your own search shots as a top square, a fair square or a long shot. The result sheet sums this up as Skill, the share of your search shots on the most likely squares, and Luck, the hits you made on unlikely squares.

Every family's rules

Families play this game in different ways. Classic has five ships of 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2 squares; Russian has ten ships of 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1 and 1 that may not touch, and a hit fires again. You can also let ships touch, play Salvo, use a quick 8 by 8 ocean, name the ship on every hit like the board game, or turn on Heat map hints, which mark a game as assisted.

Tips for winning the sea battle

• Do not fire at random. A ship of two squares always covers one square of a checkerboard pattern, so searching only every other square finds every ship in about half the shots.
• After a hit, try the four squares around it, and once you have two hits in a line, keep firing along that line from both ends.
• When ships keep apart, the squares around a sunk ship cannot hold another ship. The game marks them with rings, so spend your shots elsewhere.
• The middle of the ocean can hold more ship positions than the edges, which is why the hard computer starts there. Some players hide their ships along the edges for that reason, but a good opponent learns.
• Keep an eye on the Enemy fleet panel. Once only long ships are left, you can search with wider gaps.
• Use Replay after a game. The likelihood map shows which squares were the best shots at every moment, and you will start to see the patterns.

Frequently asked questions