You Pinspire Me
Once upon a time, games weren’t packaged in boxes and sold on the shelves at the local department store. They didn’t take up 30 square feet of closet space, and most could be played with either a deck of cards or a pencil and pad of paper!
While I was growing up, one of our family favourites, especially on chilly Winter Saturday afternoons, was Battleship. You might think that the paper version came out of someone’s attempt to save money by recreating the board game on paper, but you’d be wrong. The paper version of the game can be traced back to World War One – which makes it about one hundred years old.
Some versions of this game are still two player, but we always played it with as many people as were around and wanted to play. I was actually looking for a template of our version of the game online earlier and couldn’t find one – so I thought that I should be the one to teach the internet how to play Battleship on paper.
Preparation
We always drew out our own ‘boards’ on scrap paper (or on graph paper for the younger players, it’s a little easier), but I’ve made a PDF that you can download if you’d like to print out copies for everyone.
- Draw an 11×11 grid. Label the left-most column 1-10, starting at the second row down, and label the top row A-J, starting on the second column across.
- On the bottom half of your paper, draw a grid for each player in the game except for yourself. These grids will get progressively shorter – the first column is 4 rows high, then the second is 3, the 3rd is 2, and the 4th is 1. Label from the top row down: S C D B. (See pictures for an example of what they should look like.) The grids are where you’ll keep track of your opponents’ hits. Name one for each of the other players.
- Hide your ships on your board at the top. You have four boats to hide: Battleship, Destroyer, Cruiser, Submarine. The Battleship will take four spaces on the board and may be placed vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. To indicate that it’s your battleship, label each of the four squares with a “B”.
Continue with the Destroyer, Cruiser, and Submarine. Your ships may not overlap.
Play
- The youngest player gets to start first. (Why not? I’m the youngest, and I’m writing out the rules!) Player 1 will take three shots and call them by the squares on the board: “Number 1: A3, F8, C10.” Every player will write a “1” in each of those three squares on their game board. Starting with the person to the left of Player 1, the next player (“Player 2”) will disclose if they’ve been hit (1 Battleship, etc), or if it was a miss. If Player 2 said that one of their battleships was hit by one of the #1 shots, everyone will write a “1” in the “B” row of Player 2’s little grid. The rest of the players, in turn, will say if they’ve been hit by one of the three #1 shots (though not indicating which square it was that got them), and everyone will update the little grids at the bottom of their sheet to correspond with the reports.
- Player 2 will now call three shots, most likely attempting to capitalize off of Player 1’s successful hits. Everyone will mark down the three shots on their own boards by labeling them with a “2”. Everyone reports their hits / misses.
- Play continues and when it’s Player 1’s turn again, the numbers keep going up (ie, Player 1’s shots aren’t always going to be labeled “1” on the board).
- A player is knocked out when all of his ships have been sunk.
- The winner is the last one with any part of an unsunk boat. It’s not unusual for the last two players to have at least one part of their boat overlapping – when a suicide mission ends the game, it’s considered a tie.
Jenn vanOosten
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My brother and I played Battleship ALL THE TIME when we were young. Such a fun game. And I had no clue that you could play it with grid paper – although it makes total sense now that I see it 🙂
This is beyond awesome. FYI: Have not played in YEARS. I can see Zed and I playing this tonight after House of Cards!!
In Play 1, you say that a player calls out their shots, then *every* player marks that spot on their grids, then every player other than the shooter announces if they’d been hit. Then, in Play 4, you say that a suicide mission for the last hit ends in a tie. Does that mean that, if for example player 1 calls F4, and he has a ship in F4, does he mark his own ship as hit in the process? Additionally, does he then need to announce to everyone that his ship was hit?
Yes, on both counts.