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"You sunk my Battleship!"

I am sure we all have that phrase burned into our memory from playing board games as a child or young adult. Out of all the board games I have played in my youth, Battleship stood out for a lot of reasons.

First, it is the one board game where luck is the dominant factor. It is more about intuition than anything else. There is no rhyme or reason to it, no way to decode where your opponent is, usually not even after you hit him. The only thing resembling skill that comes into play is determining a pattern to where your opponent sets his pieces, but even this strategy takes multiple games to implement and is reliant on your opponent not anticipating it.

Second, there is the feeling,though not the reality, of strategy when deploying your ships. It always feels like if you could get "just the right combination" of vertical and horizontally facing ships, in just the right spot... you will outlast your opponent.

Third, there is the rush you get when time starts running out. As the ships fall everything intensifies. Even the act of finishing off an opponent after that first hit is fraught with tension, as you try to guess which direction the ship is placed and how far in that direction you have to go either way. Sometimes you will both be bombing each other's ship and it all comes down to who guesses correctly first.

Fourth, any game that simulates war on the open seas is exciting. It is simplistic but this is the game that still best represents that experience. There are now computer versions of this classic that add all sorts of graphics of missiles going into the air and ships sinking in a pillow of smoke. These add a new element to a classic game and are highly recommended.

Overall I would say this is a great game. It does not drag on for too long like Monopoly does sometimes. The only drawback is that it gets highly repetitive when one realizes that this game is really just the equivalent of throwing darts at a target with a blindfold on. Still, in short bursts this game is a classic. I would give it nine out of ten stars in the short term, seven out of ten over time.

Learn more about this author, Royce Radcliffe.
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