Battleship Games to Play

Basic Battleship Game Play

• In the basic game, two players compete, each armed with five ships. They each draw a square grid that is 10 spaces by 10 spaces in size. Their ships vary from two spaces to five spaces in length. Each space is given a grid coordinate. The players cannot see each other's grids. They fire on each other by shouting out grid coordinates. If the grid is occupied by part of a ship, that's a hit. Once all of a ship's spaces have been hit, it is sunk and out of action.

Salvo

• In Salvo, players are allowed to take as many shots as they have ships remaining. When they start the game, they can "call" five shots per round. As their ships are sunk, they lose one shot per lost ship. Other Salvo variations award different amounts of shots based on the type of ships left (the five-grid battleship getting five shots or the three-grid submarine getting three shots).

Tetris Battleship

• This game is played identically to Battleship, but with different boat pieces. Instead of ships in one row of two to five squares, the pieces have the same dimensions as the pieces used in the video game Tetris.

Black and White Battleships

• Each player places two full "fleets" of ships on their grid, one black and one white. Separate tallies are kept for sinking ships in each of the two fleets, leading to a variety of scoring options. Because this version has more ships than standard Battleship, it is typically played on a grid with many more squares.

Minesweeper Battleship

• This version combines Battleship with the Minesweeper video game found on many computers. Certain squares on the grid have a number on them that indicates how many ship pieces are directly adjacent to it. Ships are not allowed on any of those number squares.

Digital Battleship

• In this mathematically themed variation of Battleship, the grid has random numbers on each square. At the end of each row and column is the sum of the numbers on its squares. To discover where the ships are located, players must decipher which possible ship combinations in each row or column add up to the correct sum.