IV Battleships – Playing with fire

A few days ago we were given the task of modifying Battleships. It’s one of those great games that everyone has played; in fact only one person in our class had never played the game. The task, at first, seemed pretty daunting as it is not just any old game were playing with here, it’s a game that has a big history and has been tried and tested for a long time.


We started off by playing the game first, getting a feel for the game and understanding what we enjoyed about it when we played. After a few turns the game ended and we started to draw up our conclusions. We discussed how the game perhaps suffered from a quick nature, once you hit a ship it is quite obvious were your opponents ships are going to be due to their shape, it’s only a matter of time before its sunk. So we thought about the best way of changing this rule and decided to make it so that we could place the ships in any pattern we wanted, so instead of placing them in a line, we could place them in an L or U shape etc.

We tested this new iteration of the games rules and the game lasted quite a bit longer, as new strategies came into play and the games elements started to grow. Battleships, in my eyes has two modes, the single player stratagems of placement and attack style, as well as the mental, or poker themed control over your opponent’s actions. With this one new change, both of these areas of the game became a lot more in depth. You had to read your opponents eyes and actions as they read the board and understand what way they were going to place their pieces so much more drastically than before as now it isn’t just the chance that they are in the straight line and they will find the path within 1 or 2 turns, but now each move is full of risk and chance requiring you to really try to outthink your opponent.

We played a few games with these new rules and I lost each game, but the enjoyment was so much greater than from the original game that I think the new rule definitely made the game evolve into something so much more. However even though the games seemed more fun and enjoyable, the one major downside is that the games seemed to last a lot longer now, and something definitely needed done in order to add pace to the game. We came up with two solutions which we decided to add one at a time, a ‘missile’ attack which we could use to attack 1 entire row at any time in the game, left – right, up – down or diagonal. The other was that after each successful attack you get another go, which had the potential to could create a combo that you could ride all the way to victory in one turn, it could be a good chance to get a ‘come-back’ from some bad luck in the game.

We started off with the missile iteration and it went down pretty well. There was some pre-game diplomacy / bluffing which had effects on the gameplay, then we went in game, the first missile didn’t get any hits and the second got 1 hit. This ultimately didn’t help in the finding of ships, but it did remove 10 squares for us to have to explore through which made the game quite a bit faster.

Although the game was faster, the pace hadn’t improved from the last game and thus our final iteration game into play which fixed up our little bug and made the game quite a bit faster. The final game was quickly played at home and looking back, a pretty good addition to the game. I’m not sure if it would be better than the original, it surely is more enjoyable to me, whether or not anyone else would agree is up to the player. It’s now up to you to play with these new rules and test them out for yourself:

1. You can place your ships in any formation you want, as long as all pieces of a ship are touching a straight section of the ship, i.e. no diagonal placements. 
2. Add a 1 time only, missile attack that attacks each square along the board; vertically, horizontally or diagonally. 
3. Succession attacks, if you get a hit you’re allowed another attack.