“You sank my battleship.” An iconic line from an iconic commercial for an iconic game.
Lots of memories of battleship:
Playing a version on gray paper tablets in the backseat of a car while on vacation
Coding my own version in BASIC so I could play against the computer
A variation where you fired all of your shots at once (Salvo) instead of one at a time
The traditional Blue/Red plastic games with the pegs
The history of Battleship is partly shrouded in mist. Nobody can point with clarity to a single person that created the first game but it has been around since WWI. Ed Hutchins gets credit for designing the Milton Bradley plastic version using pegs that was released in 1967. Prior to that it was a pencil and paper game.
The basic game is largely unchanged...you call grid coordinates of your shot(s) and your opponent replies with “hit” or “miss”. Then your opponent calls coordinates. When a ship has taken a hit in each of its squares then it is “sunk”. The game continues until all of one player’s ships are sunk.
The Good: Fun game which teaches logic of patterns.
The Bad: The 2012 Battleship movie...or is it so bad that it is actually good?
The Dastardly: Don’t you hate it when a peg gets caught in the plastic hinge of the game and the board cracks when you shut it?
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