Battleship
“G-4”
“You sank my Battleship!”
In this “classic naval combat game,” the open seas were cluttered
with ships of war, five on each side. But unlike real war, these
nautical enemies decided to play fair, standing perfectly still and
taking turns firing missiles at each other. Battleship was a hit and
miss game of strategy, combining lucky guesswork with deductive
reasoning to sink the enemy fleet and rule as master of the waters.
Two flip-up gameboards kept your fleet’s location hidden from the
enemy, and vice versa. On a 10x10 grid (labeled A-J vertically, 1-10
horizontally), players arranged the five members of their
fleet—carrier, battleship, sub, destroyer, patrol boat—on either
horizontal or vertical rows (and no, you little cheaters, the ships’
pegs wouldn’t let them fit in diagonally). Once the opposing fleets
were arranged, the firing commenced.
Taking turns, players called out bingo-like combinations of numbers
and letters (“H-7! C-3!”), hoping to score a lucky hit on one of the
enemy craft. To keep track of the misses (and there were usually many),
players stuck white pegs in a matching grid on the flipped-up top of
the gameboard (red pegs noted the hits). But even after that lucky
first strike, the guesswork wasn’t over—was that the 5-space carrier or
the 2-space patrol boat, and is the rest of that tender hull laying
north, south, east or west of here? Bad guesses meant more misses, and
that gave the enemy more time to hunt your own craft down and blow them
out of the water.
Battleship caught on quickly in a Cold War world, and the game
eventually expanded into several forms. Electronic Battleship took some
of the manual labor out of the game, replacing it with nifty sound
effects. Things went a step farther in Electronic Talking Battleship,
which barked out commands and results to its opposing naval officers.
The game even took on outside licenses, resulting in customized
versions with Star Wars spaceships and other craft.
The 90’s found Battleship moving into the CD-ROM world with added
features and new forms of gameplay. Back in the physical world,
Electronic Battleship: Advanced Mission gave the original board game a
few new tweaks of its own (torpedoes, reconnaissance aircraft, voice
recognition, etc.). Even with all the advanced versions on the market,
the original Battleship remains a favorite of gamers, more than earning
its status as a board game classic.
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