Game options

[Akchir]

I want to propose two game options:
1) ship placement don't allow ships touching each other any way (direct or diagonal).
2) after successful shot attacker receives one additional shot. In other words - you can shoot until miss.

First options adds some strategy in ship placement and shooting patterns. Current game options makes game purely luck driven or mind reading
Second option gives some initiative and more passion for shooting

[DrKarotte]

Option 1 - I thought that it is a general rule that ships must not touch each other until I played today. Even if it is allowed to place ships touching another one it is not recommended as a strategy. If nothing is changed here which would be ok in my opinion it would be very important to have a BGA rule page for the game, not simply a wikipedia link. The English, French and German pages I just checked differ in many aspects; while in the English and French page nothing is written about this forbidden placement, the German has the rule. (But note that even in the example given on the English and French page no ship touches each other.)

This is a general problem with such common public domain games that there are so many house rules and variants. There should a rule page on BGA which explains the game.

There are some more interesting variants taken from the German wikipedia page, e.g.

* You take a row of x shots with x being the length of your longest ship still alive.
* You place 3 sea mines (1 square). If the enemy hits such a mine his ship gets destroyed (which means that you have to announce which ship takes a shot before, which might become annoying in an online adaption). If I understand that correctly you will always take 5 shots until your carrier is lost, even if you announce to shoot with a shorter ship (see below). It is not clear if you have to announce a ship before every shot or just 1 time before you take a row of shots (see below, too).
* You also place a fortress. This has 3 squares and must be placed at the border. It can also be in a corner (the 3 fields need not to be in a row, but every field must be adjacent to the border). The fortress has only 1 shot but sinks a ship directly.

If a ship sinks after being shot by fortress or hitting a mine you only announce that but do not give the exact position.

My personal variant would be that you tell which of your ships shoots once before taking a row of shots and then you take as many shots as the ship has in lenght.

[Liallan]

Option 1 - I thought that it is a general rule that ships must not touch each other until I played today. Even if it is allowed to place ships touching another one it is not recommended as a strategy. If nothing is changed here which would be ok in my opinion it would be very important to have a BGA rule page for the game, not simply a wikipedia link. The English, French and German pages I just checked differ in many aspects; while in the English and French page nothing is written about this forbidden placement, the German has the rule. (But note that even in the example given on the English and French page no ship touches each other.)

I've never been aware of any such forbidden placement, and I don't think it's just cause someone left it off the page or that it's a common house rule. I played this a bit as a kid and I don't think that rule existed. I also now have a PC version of it and that rule definitely doesn't exist, and it appears to be pretty much the same version (with sound effects). I think part of the fun is getting creative with placements.

But I agree that we need some definitive rules for public domain games.

The variant I don't like is the one with the two single-square ships. I accidentally took one of these, and despite my opponent having been ahead most of the game, I caught up while s/he was hunting one of those things, and then we both had one left and it was a total luck fest of who happened to find it first, and took forever. Kind of a bore. I've got to imagine that happens quite often.

[BacCM]

I want to propose two game options:
1) ship placement don't allow ships touching each other any way (direct or diagonal).
2) after successful shot attacker receives one additional shot. In other words - you can shoot until miss.

First options adds some strategy in ship placement and shooting patterns. Current game options makes game purely luck driven or mind reading
Second option gives some initiative and more passion for shooting

+1

[Ringcaat]

I don't agree that the game is based on just luck or mind reading. There are concerns for minimizing the number of spaces you have to check, such as the common strategy of shooting a checkerboard pattern to sift for destroyers. But including one-square ships greatly decreases what strategy there is, and I was very disappointed when I learned that was all the submarines are in that variant. I remembered a program for the Macintosh in which a submarine
* occupies one square not in a corner, and
* is sunk after the 3x3 square it's at the center of is hit six times.

I like this rule--it adds some intricacy to placement and strategy and also adds the psychological factor of whether a player will put their submarine(s) on the edge or not.

I remember playing on Lycos and encountering the rule that you get to shoot until you miss. It's okay, though I don't prefer it--it means you always have a chance, however small, of winning.

The idea of taking a bunch of shots in a row, but losing the ship you do it with if you hit a mine, is interesting.

I really don't like the idea of disallowing adjacent ships. There's already incentive not to put your ships together: if your opponent hits one, they may shoot in such a direction as to find your other ship 'for free'. But that means that if you're bold enough, you can choose to do it anyway and take the chance. I like that strategic/psychological aspect. That said, there's not much reason not to allow it as a variant if someone is still coding this game; it would be easy to implement.

[Gilbert of Talagbar]

I want to propose two game options:
1) ship placement don't allow ships touching each other any way (direct or diagonal).
2) after successful shot attacker receives one additional shot. In other words - you can shoot until miss.

Both of these suggestions are canonic rules if you play this game in Italy.

[Spence of Spades]

The variant I don't like is the one with the two single-square ships. I accidentally took one of these, and despite my opponent having been ahead most of the game, I caught up while s/he was hunting one of those things, and then we both had one left and it was a total luck fest of who happened to find it first, and took forever. Kind of a bore. I've got to imagine that happens quite often.

Fully in agreement with this. My experience with the board game Battleship in the States is there is no single cell ship. It ends with the 2-cell ships and gets larger from there. With single cell ships the element of strategy is gone, it comes down to who can hit the bullseye on the dart board first with their eyes closed. Eventually someone does, and sometimes you get lucky and accidentally find one before getting the larger ships eliminated. But even then that doesn't necessarily give you a monster advantage. I am about to un-favorite the game, there isn't any strategy in it. But take out the one-cell ships and it is playable again.

[SquashEngineer]

As with the original Battleship (as I recall it) placement of ships IS NOT restricted in any way, and therefore can be placed adjacent to each other and touching. I personally liked this method, as it allowed "hiding" unknown lengths of ships connected to each other, that could cause deception later in the game. The reason this worked however, was because when a ship was sunk, it was not necessary to tell your opponent "which" ship was sunk - he was normally only able to deduce which ship it was by the supposed "length" of red markers on his view of the opponent's ocean. The strategy was therefore in placing potentially two medium sized ships together (say a 2 and a 3), and your opponent only hitting 4 holes across two ships, before you declare "a" ship being sunk. He thinks he has sunk a 4 hole battleship, and so moves on to hunting other ships elsewhere in the ocean, without completing the rest of the other adjacent ship. Only later in the game does he discover his mistake - at which time it may be all too late to avoid complete annihilation.

I think the modification needed for Battleships Pencil & Paper, is to NOT SHOW THE OUTLINE OF SHIPS when there are supposedly destroyed. In the cases where ships are adjacent or touching, leave the ambiguity in place as to how many ships are potentially destroyed - ONLY indicate that "a" ship has been destroyed - it's up to the players to deduce which enemy ships are gone, and what size ships they remain on the hunt for.

[shetoksm]

I want to propose two game options:
1) ship placement don't allow ships touching each other any way (direct or diagonal).
2) after successful shot attacker receives one additional shot. In other words - you can shoot until miss.

First options adds some strategy in ship placement and shooting patterns. Current game options makes game purely luck driven or mind reading
Second option gives some initiative and more passion for shooting

It would be great if these rules were made available as options.

[SquashEngineer]

I’d also like to see Advanced Electronic Battleship rules added with weapons, ship types, and recon aircraft.