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Battleship has a very simple premise but yields hours of fun. Two players go head to head, exchanging attacks until one player sinks the other players fleet. However, like many things, Battleship is a bit more complex than it appears.

Each player has a fleet of five ships of various sizes which are deployed across a 10 x 10 grid. This means there are 100 possible spaces for each player to attack. This doesn't seem like a lot, but when you consider that your ships only take up 17 spaces, there are many, many chances for error, especially when you can't see where your other player's ships are floating!

Each player has five ships that their opponent must attack and sink:

- PT cruiser/destroyer (uses up two spaces) - Cruiser (three spaces) - Submarine (three spaces) - Battleship (four spaces) - Carrier (five spaces)

You can deploy your ships within the 10 x 10 grid, either horizontally or vertically. You can put them as close together or as far apart as desired.

Then it's a shooting war. Shot by shot, each player tries to sink the other's ships. As each ship is sunk, the defending player tells his opponent, usually in a dejected voice, that their ship was sunk.

There are a number of strategies for trying to win a Battleship game. Personally, I try to fire shots in a pattern, which I track on my own board, trying to find ships while looking for empty spaces where my opponent's ships could be hiding.

The challenging thing about playing Battleship is even when you do score a hit on a ship, you don't know what size it is, nor where the rest of the ship is positioned. There is a lot of trial and error searching in Battleship, trying to pinpoint the location of each ship. After all, when you score a hit on a ship, you never know if you must strike above, below, left or right in order to hit the other parts of the ship. Sometimes a brave and daring opponent will place their ships in close proximity to each other, such that even though you are finding hits adjacent to each other, they might actually be different ships, which can be very confusing!

It can be trickier than it might seem at first, but it's a lot of fun. Improve your tactical skills, try a game of Battleship.

Learn more about this author, Mark Dykeman.
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