Battleship

Battleship is a two-player game of luck and logic. The game has been popular since its development by Russian soldiers during World War I. Although it has been published in many variations, the best known is the 1967 Milton Bradley version, which remains popular today.

The game's initial popularity came from the ability to play it anywhere with any writing implement and on any writing surface. Soldiers often improvised naval battles on scraps of paper while waiting for orders on the battlefield. According to historian John Toland, by the 1920s, the game had become a popular way of passing the time in prisons as well as on the battlefield, with prisoners drawing play grids on their cell floors and calling moves to each other between cells.

In 1931, the Starex Novelty Company published the game as a pad of preprinted grids, calling it Salvo. Soon after Salvo was published, imitators appeared, including pad-and-paper variations called Broadsides and Combat. The convenience of printed grids and rules guides on each page of the game pads helped to further popularize the game.

Players begin by marking a grid with the position of their ships, each of which are one grid square wide. The number and length of ships varies across rule sets, but in the popular Milton Bradley (now Hasbro) version of the game, each player has six ships, ranging in length from one square (the submarine) to five squares (the aircraft carrier), with an additional two-square ship (the cruiser). Generally, the game grid is labeled on one axis with letters and the other with numbers. Players use one grid to record their ships' positions, and a second identical grid to record the results of their attacks.

The two players alternate turns, calling out “shots” in the form of grid positions: “A-1” for the upper-left square, for example. In early versions of the game, each player called out six shots at a time, which increased the chances of hitting something, but which made deducing the position of ships more difficult, since the player being fired upon did not have to specify which squares were the successful hits. In an effort to market the game to children, Milton Bradley simplified the rules for its 1967 version, requiring players to only call out one shot per turn.

In all versions of the game, when all parts of a ship have been hit, the player is required to let his opponent [Page 71]know which ship was sunk. This aids the attacker in deducing the position of other ships through the process of elimination, an idea inspired by the use of sonar to detect positions in naval warfare. The cry “You sank my battleship!”—which originated in Milton Bradley's 1970s ads—has become a part of the American pop cultural landscape.

The Milton Bradley version of Battleship has toy ships and red and white markers, allowing players to keep score.

Milton Bradley also introduced plastic ships, red “hit” and white “miss” markers, and a briefcase-like set of two plastic grids for each player. The lid of the briefcase provided the “sonar” record ofeach player's attempted strikes against his opponent, as well as obscuring the view of his opponents' ship placement on the second grid. In 1983, Milton Bradley released Electronic Battleship, which took care of the details of hits and misses with lights and sound. Since then, many computer versions of Battleship have appeared, some offering enhanced game play, but all using variations of the Milton Bradley rules.

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