Battleship

Battleship was originally a pencil-and-paper public domain game known by different names, but Milton Bradley made it into the well known board game in 1967. The pencil and paper grids were changed to plastic grids with holes that could hold plastic pegs used to record the guesses.

Each player deploys his ships (of lengths varying from 2 to 5 squares) secretly on a square grid. Then each player shoots at the other's grid by calling a location. The defender responds by "Hit!" or "Miss!". You try to deduce where the enemy ships are and sink them. First to do so wins.

The Salvo variant listed in the rules allows each player to call out from 1 to 5 shots at a time depending on the amount of ships the player has left (IE: players each start off with 5 ships, so they start off with 5 shots. As ships are sunk, the players gets fewer shots). This version of the game is closer to the original pencil-and-paper public domain game. Many versions of the pencil-and-paper game have different amounts of shots based on the ship (IE: Battleship: 5 shots. Destroyer: 3 Shots, Etc.).

In 2008, Hasbro "reinvented" the game into Battleship (Revised).

Some history of the published versions of the game:
1931: Starex Novelty Co. of NY publishes Salvo.
1933: The Strathmore Co. publishes Combat, The Battleship Game.
1943: Milton Bradley publishes the pad-and-pencil game Broadsides, The Game of Naval Strategy.
1943: Also published in 1943 Sink it by the L R Gebert Co. for distribution by G. Krueger Brewing Co.
1940's: Maurice L. Freedman Co. of RI publishes Warfare Naval Combat.
1961: Ideal publishes Salvo.

Other titles over the years have included Swiss Navy, Sunk (Parker Bros.), Convoy (Transogram), Wings (Strategy Games Co. of California), and Naval Battle (3M Paper and Pencil Version) .

Battleship Galaxies is a space combat miniatures board game that is a distant cousin to the original Battleship game. The two opposing forces represented in the game, the human Intergalactic Space Navy and the alien Wretcheridians, are represented by 20 highly-detailed starship miniatures. There are figures for several different ship types and each has an individual reference card that defines the characteristics of that ship (e.g. weapons, movement, shields). The game is played on a star field hex board.

The game is scenario driven and each scenario will define the goal of the game as well as initial board set-up. Each turn, players have a certain number of energy points that can be spent to perform actions, such as movement or fire. Combat is resolved by rolling special dice, a ten-sided die with letters and an eight-sided die with numbers. The resulting letter-number combination is compared to the target ship’s reference card to determine the result. Hits on a ship are indicated by placing colored pegs in the figure’s base.