Iterating Battleship

I’ll start this one easy. Probably not everybody knows what “to (re)iterate” means. I know I didn’t, before I started this course. According to the master Google, it means:

it·er·ate
[it-uh-reyt] Show IPA verb, -at·ed, -at·ing.
verb (used with object)
1.
to utter again or repeatedly.
2.
to do (something) over again or repeatedly.

Also it’s synonymous to rehearse, so we’ll use that term. When I say we “iterated” or “reiterated” a game, it means that I have taken the basic rules of the game and changed them either by adding or subtracting, or just changing one or more already existent rules.

That being said, the title means that I’ve created a variant of the popular game, Battleship. Is it better? Is it worse? It’s the reader/player’s choice, and I’d be glad to hear it.

The basic rules of Battleship can be found on Wikipedia (LINK).

Once we familiarized ourselves with the rules, we were given the task of reiterating the game. You have to understand something first. We have 2 rules when we reiterate something (yes, you can do anything while you’re still following those 2 rules):

1. Play the game once before reiterating, no matter how well you think you know it
2. Do 1 iteration at a time (meaning that you add/subtract/change 1 rule, play, repeat)

With that in mind, I went off to play with one of the colleagues I didn’t know that well (I consider playing/brainstorming with strangers more beneficial than with people you are accustomed with, I shall develop why in a future post) and created a new game of Battleship which I think I’d enjoy more than the initial, commercial iteration.

Here’s what we did:

After playing it the first time, we decided that the game could be predicted pretty easily and that strategies could be employed to win the game. Basically, after a number of turns, you knew a very large part of the map and could predict where the remaining ships were, based on the number of squares they took. We also decided that the fun factor in the game came from the fact that you had to guess where the ships were, and if you got one hit in a ship, then the first thing you’d do was to chase and sink that ship, before proceeding to search for a ship again. That’s the offense view. The defensive one was that if your ship got hit, you got 4 turns at most till the enemy would find out the orientation of your ship and then proceed to systematically destroy it. I’m going to try and break those apart:

Pros:

• Game is a guessing(luck) game at the beginning AND strategy, depending on the player style
• The player has more than one “tokens” (ships), so the sinking of one does not mean game over
• Each player starts with the same “stats” (number/shapes of ships and play are)

Cons:

• Once a ship has been hit ONCE, it will be sunk in maximum 7 more turns
• Game can become boring because the players can employ a systematic killing strategy
• A positive feedback loop can be created due to the first problem, as a player whose ship is hit first will lose it easily and remain with less ships than the opponent, without being able to do much

To solve some of the cons, we have employed a new mechanic:

• once per game, each player could lie about hitting or missing a ship

This means 2 lies per game, once about hitting a target (saying the opponent didn’t hit the target, although in truth, he did) and once about missing a target (saying he hit a target when, in fact, he missed).

The mechanic seemed a bit over powering and it dragged the game on too long, usually trying to find the ship that was hit but which the player denied hitting, so we added this:

• every 3 individual turns, the player can ask his opponent if he has lied in the last 3 turns

That proved highly effective, and added 2 new “struggling” dynamics:

• the player who was lied to tried to remember what happened in the last 3 turns
• in doing so, he’d bombard the area which he targeted the last 3 turns to try and verify which square was the lie on

With this new mechanic, the game proved much more challenging, as the metagame was greatly improved as well and, whilst the total playing time of the game increased, the fun factor due to lying and trying to detect lies increased as well.

Honestly, try to add the mechanics the next time you play Battleship, and please, do let me know how it is for you.

After the class was over, we heard everybody else’s iterations. I’ll list them here, for posterity, and add comments to the ones that I would like to play with:

• a one-time “special hit” that struck a whole line/column
      this seemed to decrease the play time and it also created new tactics in the game
• the players could not target the same grid letter or number in two consecutive strikes
      this was done to take out the “destroy any ship in 7 or less turns” con that I’ve noticed, as well
• if a player missed 6 times in a row, that player would get an X-shaped bomb to use in the 7th turn
      this helped players that were trailing behind, creating “a negative feedback”
• if a player hit a ship, then that player got an extra turn
      this helped players that were winning, an example of “a positive feedback”
• when a player accumulated 3 hits, he could call “an airstrike”, striking a large portion of the map
      positive feedback
• more bombs, in diverse shapes and sizes
• an “admiral square” which, if hit, wins the game for the player that hit it
     this was a particularly interesting one, as it brought luck into the game, with an overwhelming advantage if you happened to hit the admiral square
• other iterations included shrinking/expanding the board and adding/subtracting ships
      interesting to see how the tactics changed with new sizes
• if a player missed 5 times in a row, he could chose a column/row to find out information about it
      this is the same as the column/row missile, only it’s awarded as a negative feedback, not as a limited resource each player has
• the more ships a player had on the battlefield (still alive), the more shots he got
      this is a positive feedback loop, the player with more ships is way more likely to win
• two or more ships cannot touch each other
      this is a minor change, but can affect tactics easily, if you know there’s an area around each ship that is empty and you don’t have to target that, as you know it’s empty
• change the shape of the ships
      while positioning the ships, each player could choose how the squares were arranged in his ship. For example, he could create a square 2×2 ship of a 4-square ship.

Those were all the iterations, the most interesting ones, from my point of view, being the “admiral square”, the “changing the size of the board/number of ships” and “change the shape of the ships” ones, alongside my team’s own iterations.

Because it’s late in the night, an idea just occurred to me, and I am under the impression that this idea wouldn’t’ve occurred without watching the Games Britannia episode at school a couple of weeks back. Consider this a retrospective iteration to Battleship:

In the beginning of the game, each player is given a choice: he can start of with 5, 6 or 7 ships and, depending on the number of ships he choses, the board size changes BUT so does the number of hits the player has, in this manner:

5 ships – a 12×12 map – 1 shot per turn
6 ships – a 11×11 map – 2 shots per turn
7 ships – a 10×10 map – 3 shots per turn

The 6th and 7th ship are 4-square ships

Do you think this would work? If so, how would it change the way the players play?

Wiz out.

 

Bibliography:

Anon Battleship (game) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Internet]. Available from: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)&gt; [Accessed 3 November 2011a].

Anon Iterate | Define Iterate at Dictionary.com [Internet]. Available from: <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iterate&gt; [Accessed 3 November 2011b].

Julian (2009) OddThinking » Battleship Strategy [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.somethinkodd.com/oddthinking/2009/10/29/battleship-strategy/&gt; [Accessed 3 November 2011].