You Sunk My Battleship!

I had a rather interesting session on critical games studies last tuesday as we were given the task of iterating Battleships. I'm sure that everyone nows what Battleships is and how to play it so I'm not going to explain it. I paired up with Adam Woodhouse in class and we played an ordinary game of Battleships to begin with to familirise ourselves with the rules and to ensure we hadn't forgotten anything, especially as it's been years since either of us last played. Suffice to say, I annihilated Adam's fleet with minimal damage done to my own.

We decided that we wanted our iterations to improve the gameplay but not to change the game into something entirely different. The first iteration that we made to the game was to add a bonus shot, if you managed to hit your opponents ship you would get an extra shot, this helped to speed up the gameplay and made the game have a little less to do with luck, we also stated that yoou only got one bonus shot, otherwise it would be all to easy to destroy the enemy ships in a couple of rounds.

Before we began a second iteration we quickly decided that we wanted to keep the bonus shot in our version of the game as it was an effective method of speeding up gameplay and keeping a high tension (especially when I only had two spaces left on my battleship and Adam was ready to strike).

The second iteration that Adam and I decided on was to add a repair concept to the game. Each player was given two repair cards that they could use at any point in the game to fix partially destroyed ships, each repair card fixed one square of a ship and any ships that were completely destroyed were beyond repair. We decided that one repair card would not be an effective iteration but too many and the game's pacing would be drastically slowed. We also decided that when a player repairs a ship they have to tell the opponent where they have repaired, otherwise the game would be too drawn out as the opponent would have to search every square that they hit again. Unlike the first iteration, the repair cards quickly became a nuisance, as the opponent knew where the repair had happened they knew where to hit the ship again, so rather than challenging the payers and creating tension, the iteration purely served as a way of wasting a players go by making them re-hit the same ship.