Battleship (game)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Battleship is a guessing game that began not in a toy store but in the trenches and officers' quarters of the early twentieth century. Russian military officers were playing a version of it before World War I, and in 1907, a Russian poet named Ryurik Ivnev recorded a game in his diary. Two players. Two hidden fleets. No way to see where the enemy ships are placed. You call out a square, your opponent tells you whether you hit or missed, and somewhere in that slow, methodical process of elimination, one fleet gets sunk and the game ends. What sounds simple enough to sketch on the back of a notepad eventually became one of the most widely adapted games in history. How did a pencil-and-paper pastime from wartime Russia become a plastic board game, a microprocessor-powered electronic toy, a video game, a television minigame, a film, and finally a member of the National Toy Hall of Fame?

• 2. Origins and Early Editions

  ›

  Parallels have been drawn between Battleship and a game called Basilinda, published in 1890 by E. I. Horsman. Whether that connection is direct is unclear, but by the early twentieth century the game was circulating well enough that a Russian poet wrote about it in 1907. The first commercial version to reach American shelves came in 1931, when a company called Starex published Salvo in the United States. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, several other publishers produced their own editions. The Strathmore Company released a version called Combat: The Battleship Game. Milton Bradley put out Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy. Maurice L. Freedman published Warfare Naval Combat. Strategy Games Co. took the concept in a stranger direction, releasing a version called Wings that pictured planes flying over the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of these early editions shared one thing: they were built around pre-printed paper pads, nothing more than grids waiting to be filled in with pencil marks.

• 3. The Plastic Revolution

  ›

  Around 1964, a Hasbro employee named Ronald A. Brehio built a wooden pegboard version of the game and brought it to company executives. They rejected the pitch and confiscated the prototype. Hasbro may then have sold the rights to Milton Bradley, because in 1967 Milton Bradley published a version using plastic pegboards and miniature plastic ships, the edition that most people today recognize as the definitive form of the game. A decade later, in 1977, Milton Bradley pushed further into technology by releasing Electronic Battleship, a microprocessor-based toy capable of generating sounds. Designers Dennis Wyman and Bing McCoy built that version. Electronic Battleship was followed in 1989 by Electronic Talking Battleship. In 2008, a redesigned edition arrived that used hexagonal tiles instead of a square grid. Each player's board in that version contained islands, and ships could only be placed around those islands and only within the player's own half of the board. That 2008 edition remains available today under the name Battleship Islands.

• 4. Rules and Ships

  ›

  Each game of Battleship is played on four grids, two per player. The standard grid is 10x10, with squares identified by letter and number. Before play begins, each player secretly places their fleet on one grid, arranging ships horizontally or vertically across consecutive squares. Ships cannot overlap and cannot be placed diagonally. Players then take turns calling out a target square; the opponent announces whether the shot is a hit or a miss. In the pegboard version, a red peg marks a hit and a white peg marks a miss. When every square of a ship has been struck, its owner must announce its sinking. The 1990 Milton Bradley rules specified five ship types: a Carrier occupying five squares, a Battleship taking four, a Cruiser and a Submarine each covering three, and a Destroyer filling two. In 2002, Hasbro renamed the Cruiser to Destroyer and introduced a two-square ship called the Patrol Boat, shifting the fleet configuration while keeping the core mechanic intact. The 1931 Salvo edition introduced a different system in which players target multiple squares simultaneously. Milton Bradley later incorporated Salvo as an optional variation described as suited for more experienced players.

• 5. Digital and Screen Adaptations

  ›

  Battleship was among the earliest board games to become a computer game, with a version appearing on the Z80 Compucolor in 1979. Decades of digital editions followed on platforms ranging from the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in 1987 to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Gear in 1993, with further versions for Genesis, Super NES, and PCs across the 1990s and early 2000s. Each platform introduced small rule shifts. The NES version used an 8x12 grid; the Game Boy version used 8x8. A cruiser in the NES version carried a five-shot missile that struck five squares in an X pattern in a single turn. Some editions added submarine-tracking sonar and aerial reconnaissance. On Nintendo DS, the game appeared within Clubhouse Games under the name Grid Attack, played on a 7x7 grid with options for four-player gameplay and variable ship shapes. In 2012, a military science fiction film called Battleship drew from the Milton Bradley board game and added an alien invasion storyline. A tie-in board game version introduced alien ship playing pieces alongside the standard fleet. When the film arrived, the standard board game reverted to the original 1967 design. A 2016 video game edition for PlayStation 4 used the PlayLink technology.

• 6. Pop Culture Cameos

  ›

  In the third season of the television program Family Game Night on The Hub, a minigame version of Battleship played on a 5x5 grid appeared as a segment, with the first team to sink three ships declared the winner. On the Amazon Prime Video series The Grand Tour, presenters Richard Hammond and James May staged a full-scale version of the game using two colored cranes and twenty REVAi vehicles as missiles. The ships in that match ranged from ordinary cars to campervans. James May won by sinking all of Hammond's ships. In 2025, Battleship was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, a recognition that placed it alongside some of the most enduring games and toys ever made.