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How to Make a Grid With Coordinates to Play Battleship

Battleship is a pencil-and-paper game in which you try to hide your fleet from an opponent while trying to find, and sink, his fleet. Since the 1930s, it has appeared as a commercial game in several formats, but it remains popular as a "back-of-an-envelope" game. The battlefield is a grid of squares within which the fleets occupy rectangles of different lengths. Creating a battlefield grid is a straightforward process involving little skill.

Things You'll Need

4 sheets graph paper
Rule
Pencil

Instructions

- 1
  Start two squares in from the edge of a sheet of graph paper, and then count 10 squares across a sheet. Quarter-inch or 5 mm squares are ideal. Draw a line along the bottom of the squares, from the start of the first one to the end of the last one.
- 2
  Place your pencil and a rule at the start of the line, and draw a vertical line rising 10 squares. Do the same at the other end of the base line, and then draw a top line joining the two verticals. You now have a 10-by-10 square.
- 3
  Draw along all the lines within the square to create a grid of 100 clearly defined squares. In the row above the top line of squares, and starting on the left, label the vertical columns with the letters "A" to "J." In the column to the left of the squares, label each row with the numbers "1" to "10," starting at the top.
- 4
  Create four identical grids for a game of battleships. Give two grids to each player, one to record his own fleet positions, and one to record his attempts to locate his opponent's fleet.

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