Battleship Games
–by Jim Polczynski (published in 1997, this article was edited and republished in 2003 )
Over thirty-five years ago, Milton Bradley released its new games for the year and among those games was BATTLESHIP. “You sunk my battleship!” could be heard during Saturday morning commercials. Using an aggressive advertising campaign, among other things, Milton Bradley succeeded in being the only company to continuously produce a BATTLESHIP game for any period any period of time – and is still growing strong. Battleship has become the “Kleenex” of a long line of games which go back to the early part of this century.
Originally the game was called SALVO or SALVO: THE BATTLESHIP GAME. Most early BATTLESHIP games were pen-and-paper games. Even Milton Bradley’s first attempt at the game was a pen-and-paper game. It is reported that the game was invented by Russian soldiers somewhere between 1917 and 1922 and Whitehill (Games: American Boxed Games and Their Makers, 1892 – 1992, With Values) suggests that BASILINDA, a game from 1890 by E. I. Horsman, may be a forerunner of BATTLESHIP. Whitehill includes a promotion from Horsman which shows opponents sitting across from each other moving pieces with a partition between the two players hiding the pieces of one player from the other. If BASILINDA is in fact a forerunner to Battleship, this certainly presents a conflict with the 1917 to 1922 dates. I imagine, there needs to be additional research to resolve when exactly BATTLESHIP was invented.
One of the key elements in the design of BATTLESHIP games is the hiding of pieces. BATTLESHIP plays by “discovery,” where each player hides their arrangement of vessels from the other and they each, by guessing, try to uncover their opponent’s setup (usually once a vessel is placed it may not be moved). The player to accomplish this first wins. The game is usually played on square or rectangular grids. The grid is thus composed of rows and columns. The rows are often given letters and the columns numbers (or vis-à-vis) allowing a player to “call out” a square on their opponent’s grid by saying, for example, “G4″. The player being “fired” upon, then reports whether or not the shot was a hit. The majority of BATTLESHIP games refer to the process of firing upon the opponent as firing a salvo, a military term to describe the simultaneous discharge of guns, bombs or rockets. Most of the BATTLESHIP games allow for anywhere between five to ten shots per salvo, which represent a player’s turn. The player being fired upon then reports one or more of the following: the number of hits scored, the number of vessels hit and/or sunk, the names of the vessels hit and/or sunk, or the locations which were hits. This whole process of calling out locations and issuing reports on the fire leaves me with an impression of BINGO. The predecessor to Bingo was a game called LOTO (or LOTTO) and it may well be that whoever invented BATTLESHIP had LOTO in mind when it was invented.
Not all BATTLESHIP games are created equal, even if they do have some fundamental elements in common. The designers of BATTLESHIP games could vary a number of different elements which include, but are not limited to, the grid size, the number of ships (I use ships here even though some of the games used air and land vehicles), the number of ships of a given size, the number of shots fired per turn (i.e., salvo), whether there are penalties upon having a ship sunk, how the pieces could be placed in the grid and the content of the report given by the player being fired upon. I will explain these by using the 1967 Milton Bradley BATTLESHIP as an example. The grid size used is a 10 by 10 grid and there are five ships – a Carrier, a Battleship, a Cruiser, a Submarine and a Destroyer. The respective sizes of the ships are 5, 4, 3, 3 and 2. The size of the ship indicates that the ship takes up that many squares in the grid. In a pen-and-paper game, the player would shade in the squares. In a game like Milton Bradley’s BATTLESHIP, and most “modern” BATTLESHIP games, plastic ships with pegs are fit into holes. Most people may be surprised to know that the classic 1967 BATTLESHIP allows for three different games: a “one shot” game, a five shot salvo game giving reports of where the hits are, and a second five shot salvo where only how many hits were made is provided. The penalties in the salvo varieties consist of a player loosing one shot per salvo for every ship they loose. Given that the game provides 100 squares and the ships take up seventeen squares, a player wins by discovering 17% of the grid, a value I call the Discovery Ratio. Most of the BATTLESHIP games provide an initial ratio of between 10% and 20%. Other elements in the game design, such as penalties, alter the current ratio as game play progresses.
The games are not really that difficult in terms of the strategy a player requires to play the game, but there have been some interesting games “built on top of” BATTLESHIP. Some of the games, such as Helen of Toy’s (which I think is a great name for a toy company) TASK FORCE and Waddington’s BATTLE, provide grids with land and sea and further provide naval vessels, land vehicles and aircraft. For example, a tank must be on land while an aircraft could be on a square which contains both land and sea. In TASK FORCE, the game is made more complex by requiring the player to first determine which one of three islands house the opponent’s Head Quarters and then demolish all pieces on the island or above it in the air.
My personal favorites are STRATEGIC COMMAND, CHECKPOINT: DANGER!, and SUB SEARCH. STRATEGIC COMMAND is a big game where one player places magnetic pieces on one side of a vertical grid and the other player does the same on the other side. When a player lands on the same square as a piece on the other side the magnets repel each other and the opponent’s piece is knocked off the board. The game deviates from BATTLESHIP, though, in that it allows the pieces to move. SUB SEARCH is probably my favorite over all. It has an elaborate three dimensional set up. There is a surface game visible to both players and each player also has a hidden area composed of three depth levels where submarines and a mine are hidden. A player wins by sinking either all three surface ships or all three submarines. The surface vessels may fire depth charges to declared locations and the submarines may fire torpedoes to the surface ships. Players mark their hits and misses on one of three grids which correspond to the three depth levels. The game also includes a spinner with “hit” and “miss” areas on the spinner. Players use this spinner when firing a torpedo. The other innovation in SUB SEARCH is the idea that a shot has multiple squares which it can affect. The explosive force of a shot may reach one of two selected ranges: the nearest horizontal and vertical squares and the squares above and below (if there is one) or the nearest vertical, horizontal and diagonal neighbors on the same level as the shot.
There have also been interesting “twists” on BATTLESHIP. The game of FLEET is actually a solitaire BATTLESHIP in which the placement of the ships are pre-drawn in invisible ink and the player uses a special pen to locate the vessels. The player must locate all the vessels before using up more than 32 shots. Altenburg-Stralsunder’s game of SEA BATTLE is a card game (and one of the easiest games of the bunch). Players have two types of cards, water cards and ship cards, both of which have the same type of backs. Then, there are the non-military games, which are modeled on BATTLESHIP. The earliest of these is perhaps PATHFINDER issued by Milton Bradley in the 1950s (and was still in print more than twenty years later). Other interesting games are AMAZE by Shuco Games, where the players each set up a grid of mazes and they then try to weave through the maze their opponent sets up, MIND MAZE by Parker Brothers, and DEAD STOP by Milton Bradley.
But perhaps the most interesting deviation from BATTLESHIP is found in games such as MASTERMIND, and two lesser known games, ZONE X and BLACK BOX, both by Parker Brothers. All three of these games play by having one player be a “code maker” and the other be a “code breaker”, unlike BATTLESHIP games, where each player simultaneously plays both code maker and code breaker. Play progresses by the code breaker making a guess and the code maker providing a report on the guess. Jon Freeman (The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games) declared BLACK BOX inferior to MASTERMIND, even though a “surprisingly good game.” He also states that it is more similar to BATTLESHIP than is MASTERMIND and in some sense he is correct, but it is my strong belief that both games are evolved from BATTLESHIP. My own feeling is that BLACK BOX is a much more interesting and challenging game. A good code breaker in MASTERMIND should be able to guess the code in four or five guesses (a guess consists of four pegs). BLACK BOX requires many more guesses and stronger deductive effort. The game is played by firing “rays” into the box, where four balls are strategically hidden. Rays may follow deflections or reflections, pass straight through the box, or flow directly into one of the hidden balls and not come out of the box.
Battleship games are one of my favorite classes of games. I most enjoy games with hidden information and the subsequent dynamics of uncovering that information. I take this opportunity to give a collective salute to all BATTLESHIP games and to those Russian soldiers, or whoever was responsible for inventing the game in the first place.
Here is a (partial) chronological listing of BATTLESHIP style games:
- 1931; SALVO; The Starex Company
- 1932; WINGS: THE NEW OLYMPIC GAME; Strategy Games Company
- 1933; COMBAT, THE BATTLESHIP GAME; The Strathmore Company
- 1939; ADMIRALS, THE NAVAL WAR GAME; Merchandisers, Inc.
- 1940s; WARFARE NAVAL COMBAT; Maurice L. Freedman Company
- 1940; SALVO; Signal Gasoline
- 1940; THE BATTLESHIP GAME; Whittman
- 1941; HIDE NO PEEK; Trojan Games (see note 1)
- 1942; COMBAT; Chicago Printing & Publishing
- 1943; BROADSIDES, THE GAME OF NAVAL STRATEGY; Milton Bradley
- 1945; AHOY!; Edward Smith
- 1945; RADAR SALVO; Wilkinson
- 1950; SEA BATTLE; Kaywood
- 1957; TASK FORCE; Helen of Toy
- 1961; SALVO; Ideal
- 1962; STRATEGIC COMMAND GAME; Transogram
- 1963; P. T. BOAT 109; Ideal (see note 2)
- 1967; BATTLESHIP; Milton Bradley
- 1968; CONVOY; Transogram
- 1970; CHECKPOINT: DANGER!; Ideal (see note 3)
- 1973; SUB SEARCH; Milton Bradley
- 1974; SEA BATTLE; Altenburg-Stralsunder
- 1974; FLEET; Lee Publications
- 1976; BATTLE; Waddington (see note 4)
- 1977; CODE NAME: SECTOR; Parker Brothers
Note 1. HIDE NO PEEK is significant because it is a non-military battleship game.
Note 2. P. T. BOAT 109 is the same game as Ideal’s 1961 SALVO.
Note 3. The goal of CHECKPOINT DANGER! is to locate four “checkpoints” which are placed anywhere in a 7 by 9 grid. Thus, the initial Discovery Ratio is only 6%, but this is dramatically reduced by the geometry and rules of the game. A player places “probes” into the game and searches for checkpoints along vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. If a checkpoint is visible, with no obstructing pegs in its way, this is reported. Thus, a probe placed in the center of the grid may potentially, in one move, search 26 of the available 63 points.
Note 2: In Waddington’s BATTLE game, each player has gun batteries, anti-aircraft, an ammunition dump, a battleship, cruisers, submarines, an aircraft carrier and four aircraft; the aircraft are the only pieces which may be positioned on land or sea since it is assumed they are in the “air.”
