Battleship on paper — find the hidden fleet
Each player hides three ships on a small grid and fires at the other's grid by calling squares. All you learn is 'hit' or 'miss', and from that you work out where the ships are.
From Battleship, the pencil-and-paper game.
What it shows a designer
Each yes-or-no answer narrows where the ships can be. It shows deduction on a hidden map, and how the size of the board sets how much luck there is at the start.
Credits
- Made by
- Traditional pencil-and-paper game
- This version
- A 6 by 6 grid and three ships
- Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)
gambiter.com/paper-pencil/Battleship_game.html
What you need
- paper
- a pen each
How to play
- Two grids. Each player draws two grids of 6 by 6 squares, A to F across and 1 to 6 down: one for your ships, one for your shots. The usual game uses 10 by 10; this smaller one fits in ten minutes.
- Hide ships. Without showing anyone, mark one ship 3 squares long and two ships 2 squares long, each across or down, not overlapping.
- Call a square. Toss a coin to see who starts. Take turns calling one square, like C4. The other player says 'hit' or 'miss'. Mark it on your shots grid with a cross for a hit and a dot for a miss.
- Sunk. When every square of a ship has been hit, its owner says 'sunk'.
- Win. The first to sink all three of the other player's ships wins.
After playing, talk about
- After a hit, how did you choose the next square?
- Did you hide your ships in a pattern?
- How much was luck at the start?
Its blocks
How its blocks were checked against BoardGameGeek
- Battleship: partly checkable, nothing against it. race to finish: not checkable. direct confrontation: confirmed (Wargame). skill with luck: not checkable. deduction: confirmed (Deduction). war and conquest: not checkable. take turns: not checkable.
In boardgameBuilder, Open game puts its blocks on the canvas. Changed, the same file can come back here from Propose a game.