Few Ships Left
Extreme
Used by Smart Hint
Only a few ships are left to place — every way they could still fit agrees on this cell.
- Ship segment
- Water
- Cells that establish the pattern
- Where the conclusion lands
How it works
- Late in a board most cells are already settled. Here only four are still open, and just two ships are missing: one 2-ship and one submarine.
- Few enough to enumerate the whole fleet at once. The 2-ship needs two cells side by side, and the top row offers only two such pairs — the first two open cells, or the last two.
- Both pairs pass through the middle of the three, so that cell is a ship whichever pair is right.
- Now the submarine. Whichever pair the 2-ship takes, the leftover top-row cell sits directly beside it — and ships never touch, so it's water. The lone middle-board cell is the submarine's only remaining home.
- Two cells settled, and the board never needed a single row or column count to do it. That's the difference from Count the Line: this reasons about the fleet, not a line.