Before we owned the Battleship the game we wanted to play it with our boys and figured out a way to make our own!
Drawing the Grids
- Using a ruler and black pencil, each player draws a grid of nine rows by nine columns. Leave room on each sheet of paper for another, similar-sized grid.
- On the bottom row of each grid, using the black pencil, number the squares from “1” to “8”. Leave the square in the bottom left-hand corner blank. Mark the squares in the row on the far left of the grid with the letters “A” to “H”, with “A” in the top left-hand corner. Leave the bottom-left hand corner square blank.
- Using a black pencil, each player now draws their “fleet” onto their grid, without showing their opponent. The fleet consists of two submarines, two destroyers, one cruiser, one battleship and one aircraft carrier.
- The aircraft carrier is a line of five “A”s, the battleship a line of four “B”s, the cruiser is three “C”s, destroyers are lines of two “D”s and submarines are an “S” marked in one square.
- The ships can be drawn in either horizontal or vertical lines, but cannot overlap. For example, if a submarine is placed on the square C4, no other ship can be placed on that square.
- Each player now repeats Steps 1 & 2, to make a clean grid.
Playing the Game
- Player One calls the coordinate of a square on the grid – for example, “B1”. Player Two checks whether they have a boat placed on that square. If so, Player Two calls “Hit”. Player One marks a Hit on B1 on their clean grid, using a colored pencil to write the letter “H”. If there is no boat on the square, Player Two calls “Miss”. Player One marks this on their clean grid, using the letter “M”. Use different-colored pencils to denote Hits and Misses.
- Each player takes a shot on the opposing fleet in turn.
- If all the squares that embody a ship are hit, the ship “sinks”. The player whose ship has been sunk must declare this and also say what type of ship it was.
The game ends when one player sinks all boats in the other player’s fleet, by correctly deducing which squares they were placed on