Universal Studios hopes to rake in millions of dollars this weekend with the release of its new action film Battleship, and sales of the classic board game are expected to get a nice boost, too. As readers may recall, the  game play is simple: Each player arranges five ships—an aircraft carrier, battleship, cruiser, submarine, and destroyer—on a ten-by-ten grid of squares and attempts to “sink” his opponent’s ships by calling out the squares where he believes his enemy’s ships are hiding. Most players approach the game as essentially one of chance, targeting squares at random and hoping for a “hit.” But is there a better strategy? If a friend challenges you to a nostalgic game of Battleship this weekend, is there a way to increase the chances that your fleet will emerge victorious?

There is. Nick Berry, a technology consultant and president of DataGenetics, a data mining company based in Seattle, has meticulously laid out several strategies that will improve your chances of sinking your opponent’s ships before she sinks yours. These methods are battle-tested: Berry created computer algorithms to employ his strategies in hundreds of millions of simulations so he could calculate their respective success rates.

Berry started by assessing the strategy most players intuit, which he refers to as Hunt/Target. The computer begins in Hunt mode—that is, firing at random until it hits a ship. When it has a hit, it focuses fire on the adjacent squares. Once the ship is sunk, the computer reverts back to Hunt mode until it hits another target. In Berry’s simulations, it took an average of 66 moves to sink an opponent’s battleship. It’s a serviceable approach, but there’s still a lot of random guessing involved.