Battleships

Paper version of the game, very basic, can be dawn up with a simple pen and paper. This makes the game very accessible and free. The game was known around this period of time and published as the pen and paper game by the Milton Bradley Company.

Here the game has been marketed in a good old American family style, using visuals from the 50’s/ early 60’s. The father and son sitting enjoying a game after dinner whilst the mother and daughter do the washing up and laugh along with the men in the household. This is very interesting as it shows popular culture incorporated into mainstream retail products, really stereo typing the times in its visuals. 

Later versions of battle ships I have found seem to use young players playing the actual game on the boxes, obviously the age the product aims itself at is 8-14 years range. It’s very interesting how target audiences are portrayed in artwork and how different companies/artists go about getting that across in the finished products. Fonts and colours are also changing, again with the times.

Version of battleships that has been made to incorporate the movie G.I.JOE, the rise of the cobra. The game is obviously very versatile and other variants, be it themes, or other forms of movie etc promotion can be used and still be viable or in relation to the original game itself.

The most recent version of battleships I could find, in a Langley’s in Norwich. The physical game has not changed from the one above in most respects and the imagery used on the box stays the same in theme to other boxes. It is very interesting to note how the earlier version of the game (the 50’s box) is the only box that seems a lot different to the others. The more recent boxes don’t seem to depict the cultures that they were made for as much as the earlier box. 

Battleship Rules

The game is played over four grids, two for each player. The grids are typically square and are in 10x10 within a grid, individual squares on the grid are identified by letters and numbers. One grid is used to arrange ships and record the opponent’s shots, whilst the other is used to record their own shots.

Before the game begins, each player arranges their ships secretly and the objective of the game is to correctly sink the other player’s ships before the opponent sinks theirs. Ships can be arranged horizontally or vertically, and how many squares a ship occupies depends on the type of ship. Ships can not overlap or occupy the same squares at the same time.

After each player places their ships, they take turns announcing a target square in an opponent’s grid that they wish to shoot at. If a ship is in the announced square, then it is hit and the opponent must declare a hit, then take his/her turn. When all the squares of a player’s ship are hit, the ship is sunk. After all of one opponent’s ships have been sunk, the game ends and the other player wins.

A slightly different version of the game is played in India. Instead of announcing whether a shot is a hit or miss immediately, the players simply say how many of their opponent's three shots were hits and if so on what kind of vessel. This allows for more strategy in game-play and loosens the game's dependency on luck. A slightly different recording system is used in this variation as there is a new importance on what turn a player hit something on. The ships themselves are also slightly different; the Indian version uses two submarines (two spaces long), two destroyers (three spaces long), one battleship (five spaces long), and one aircraft carrier (five spaces arranged in a 'T' pointing in any direction).

Platform Variations

• Electronic Battleship: Advanced Mission published for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum.
• Risk / Battleship / Clue, for the Game Boy Advance.
• Battleship / Connect Four / Sorry! /Trouble for the Nintendo DS.
• Monopoly / Boggle / Yahtzee / Battleship for the Nintendo DS.
• Hasbro Family Game Night for Playstation 2 and Nintendo Wii.

The Playstation 2 and Wii versions change the rules slightly including the size of the grid (8 x 12 in the NES version, 8 x 8 in the Game Boy version), size of ships (it is common to feature a submarine that takes up only a single square) and special shot missiles for each ship (for example, in the NES version the cruiser has a 5-shot missile which strikes 5 squares in an X pattern on the grid in one turn. Submarine-tracking sonar and aerial reconnaissance to spot ships are also features).