Epic Gumdrop Ep 28: Battleship
This episode of the podcast Jeff and James take a look at the classic popular game Battleship, pausing to consider its history and gameplay before firing blindly at each other.
Listen above or subscribe via iTunes.
(Length: approx 21min)
Here’s our notes from the show:
Battleship
While some suggest earlier precedent, the earliest commercial version of a battleship format game came out in 1931. Salvo, published by Starex Co. in the US brought us the familiar world of a gridded seascape. It was a pencil and paper version, and one of the main differences was that in Salvo 6 targets were initially selected and attacked all at once. The Salvo Variant in Milton Bradley’s battleship is based on this. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
During the 1930s and 40s there were a variety of paper based versions of the game.
1933 brought us Combat: The Battleship Game. 1943 saw Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy (also by Milton Bradley). In the 1940s there was Warfare Naval Combat and Wings.
This leads us to the big one, which didn’t come out until 1967, somewhat later than I expected. Milton Bradley’s Battleship. Wikipedia gives Ed Hutchins credit for the plastic board and peg version. To finish our timeline, 1977 brought us Electronic Battleship. But that wasn’t enough. In 1989 we had Electronic Talking Battleship. And in 2008 they brought us Battleship with hexagonal tiles, Battleship: The Tactical Combat Game. This one introduced a secret unit deployment mechanic. I haven’t played this more recent version, but it sounds intriguing.
Let’s look closer at the Milton Bradley version that most of us know.
Here’s the components, for memories that need dusting off:
-
4 10×10 grids, 2 for each player. The x and y axes are labelled by letter and number.
-
There are 5 ship types:
-
Aircraft Carrier: 5 spaces
-
Battleship: 4 spaces
-
Submarine: 3 spaces
-
Destroyer: 3 spaces
-
Patrol Boat: 2 spaces
While the game itself seems pretty straightforward, my questioning mind immediately ran towards why Battleship in 1967? Considering how early a lot of the other versions were, including Milton Bradley’s why now for this one?
Perhaps war was in the air – there was the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam in 1964, the later involving the president coming on TV and addressing the populace.
And war was already a theme at Milton Bradley if you look at their previous war-themed American Heritage Game series:
- 1961: Civil War
- 1961: Battle Cry (Civil War)
- 1962 Broadside (ships)
- 1962: Dogfight (WWII air combat)
- 1965: Hit the Beach (WWII Pacific campaign)
- 1975: Skirmish
These run nicely up to Battleship in 1967. I believe these other games were commonly 10 and up, whereas Battleship was aged 8+. Was Battleship an attempt to capitalize on their success at war games with a younger audience?
With its bright plastic game cases and its simple guessing game mechanic, Battleship has stayed with us. Part of the beauty of the game might be its simplicity. If we were stranded somewhere and only had a pencil and a piece of paper, we could play. The guessing takes just a small step above Tic-Tac-Toe. Maybe.
One aspect I found interesting about the game is that it has so many variants, many depending on which country you happen to be in. Let’s take a look at a bunch. This is the area I found most interesting, because it’s hard not play Battleship without thinking of how you’d fix it.
Variations
Salvo
From Battleship rules:
The SALVO variation of this game is recommended for more experienced players who have become familiar with the basic game. Use the same rules as in the basic game of battleship except:
-
On your turn, call out 5 different shots and resolve.
-
Whenever one of your ships has been sunk you lose one shot in your next salvo.
-
For a more challenging SALVO game, don’t disclose which of your ships have been hit.
The Wikipedia lists a possible house variant, along with regional variants. These are well worth checking out.
Some of these variations make a game I’ve always seen as kind of boring seem interesting to me! I like adding in these real world mechanics, such as limited ammunition, boat movement, different boat styles depending on time period which would impact firing, range and speed of movement. It wouldn’t take much to make the game a lot more sophisticated and feel more fulfilling than a basic guessing game. It doesn’t have to become a full blown miniatures naval war game to be fun.
I haven’t had a chance to try these variants out, but we have a version of Battleship that I want to crack out and play. It might even be a fun way to get the kids involved in game design, with the challenge being how can many ways can we modify Battleship? New components? New rules? Maybe Battleship is an ideal jumping off point.
Related Posts
About The Author
james
When he's not podcasting, playing board games or building LEGO with his kids then he's LEGO gaming boardcasts in his pod. Also, not a Time Lord.
Hi Guys,
First up, apologies this is going to be a long comment. I’d like to start off by saying I love your podcasts. It’s like they were made just for me (as a 41 year old dad with 3 kids ages 1, 5 and 8) and the dynamic you guys have got going on is great. Plus it is really interesting. I found it looking for lego podcasts again (there aren’t many and I think yours was recommended on a website I found) – listened to all of those. Then some Breaking Dads (which are also great) and now I’m going through the Epic Gumdrop podcasts which might just be bringing me out of my board game dark ages. I listened to the 12 days of Boardgames and went to a game store with the intention of buying Kings of Tokyo and walked out with Machi Koro (after discussion with the helpful person there) – then went out and bought the Harbor expansion next day and some sleeves and had a games night with friends (lucky I sleeved them as one of them spilt his drink all over the carefully laid out base game I was going to start them out on). It was such a great night.
Anyway, I’ll try and work out how to leave feedback on iTunes so I can say all this in a place where others will read it. What I was going to comment on was the Battleship podcast. I have no interest in Battleship and this wasn’t on my ‘listen to next’ list, but then I remembered a game I played with my dad as a kid called “Midway” or “The Battle of Midway” or some such, which used the Battleship mechanic to great effect. I’m going to do all this from my memory as an 8 year old rather than googling it, but it was one of my favourite games so I have some confidence. The game probably came out in the late 70s as I was 8 in 1982 and I don’t remember this game ever looking new (not much of stuff we had back then did). We only had a few games and my dad was into war games and had Squad Leader and the Cross of Iron expansion. This is a pretty complex adult game and I suspect mini wargames use a lot of the same mechanics as there was a fair bit of measuring line of sight with strings and rolling lots of dice and many many tables. Needless to say I just did what my dad advised and usually lost interest about half way through. It was a cool game though and I did appreciate it. It had these really cool boards with a detailed landscape which could be joined in different ways as the roads and forests all aligned in the same places. Gameplay followed different scenarios (based on actual battles I think) and you had a billion cardboard markers which represented squads and squad leaders, tanks, half-tracks etc.
Anyway, this comment is about Midway so I better get back to it. Midway used a very large grid and you either played the US or Japanese Navy in the Pacific during WWII. The game was based around Battleship mechanic in order to locate the enemy fleet, however there were some modifications in that you moved your fleet around, could split your fleet and could only search within range of your spotter planes – the premise is that the whole area is blanketed in smokescreen (which was actually used). This went on until you found your opponents fleet and then went to a second board which represented the grid square the fleet was on and had elongated spaces and matching elongated markers with a plan view of each ship in your fleet (or part thereof). You then arranged your fleet (protecting your carriers as much as possible) and got any fighter planes you had in a ‘ready’ state airborne, the attacker would then arrange their planes either on top of the ships (dive bombers), next to them (torpedo bombers) and your fighters around somewhere to engage your defensive fighters. The ships also had AA guns at different capacities and could protect other ships depending on how close they were. Then a dice-rolling, lookup-table-looking and factor-adjusting melee ensued which resulted in the demise of many planes and hopefully some ships (if you were the attacker). This phase ended and the battered fleet would try and evade further detection (which given the size of the grid was often possible) and the surviving planes would limp back to their fleet – probably on fumes. The game would ramp up and you would have these sorties more often because it would become harder and harder to evade detection again once found.
It was also asymmetric as the US fleet was much smaller and weaker than the massive Japanese navy. Taking down the Yamato for instance was invariably very costly to your dwindling air force. However, I think this was balanced to a limited degree by the US being able to win either by destroying the Japanese fleet or getting enough carriers to the besieged Midway Island. You also had an airbase there from which you could launch planes. However, it was still much easier to win if you took the Japanese side.
All that aside it was a great game, and very good timing as I just then messaged my dad to ask if he still had it, and he had – he also mentioned he had put all his games on Gumtree (the Australian equivalent to Craigslist), including hundreds of Magic cards – probably all for a pittance. He said to take a look and tell him what I wanted. So – phew. Looks like you guys may have brought me out of my board game dark ages just in time. Thank you.
Hey Abe – that is a great story! Nothing pleases me more than to hear someone is as obsessed about all these things as we are. And it sounds like perfect timing for you to get your oldest two kids hooked on the boardgame hobby. Your 8 year old is probably old enough to start kicking your rear in Midway!
I’ve been playing a nice 2 player game called Patchwork with both my 5 & 8 year old this week and will be highlighting this and another two player game in an upcoming episode – will try and talk about them more from the perspective of playing games with kids.