Морской бой: история и варианты игры

Strategy type guessing game for two players

Battleship (also known as Battleships or Sea Battle) is a strategy type guessing game for two players. It is played on ruled grids (paper or board) on which each player's fleet of warships are marked. The locations of the fleets are concealed from the other player. Players alternate turns calling "shots" at the other player's ships, and the objective of the game is to destroy the opposing player's fleet. Battleship is known worldwide as a pencil and paper game which dates from World War I. It was published by various companies as a pad and pencil game in the 1930s and was released as a plastic board game by Milton Bradley in 1967. The game has spawned electronic versions, video games, smart device apps and a film.

The game of Battleship is thought to have its origins in the French game L'Attaque played during World War I, although parallels have also been drawn to E. I. Horsman's 1890 game Basilinda, and the game is said to have been played by Russian officers before World War I. The first commercial version of the game was Salvo, published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company. Other versions of the game were printed in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Strathmore Company's Combat: The Battleship Game, Milton Bradley's Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy and Maurice L. Freedman's Warfare Naval Combat. Strategy Games Co. produced a version called Wings which pictured planes flying over the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of these early editions of the game consisted of pre printed pads of paper. a pioneering microprocessor based toy, capable of generating various sounds. Electronic Battleship was designed by Dennis Wyman and Bing McCoy. It was followed in 1989 by Electronic Talking Battleship. In 2008, an updated version of Battleship was released, using hexagonal tiles. In the updated version, each player's board contains several islands on which "captured man" figurines can be placed. Ships may be placed only around the islands, and only in the player's half of the board. When the movie Battleship was released, the board game reverted to the original 1967 style. The 2008 updated version is still available as Battleship Islands. Battleship was one of the earliest games to be produced as a computer game, with a version being released for the Z80 Compucolor in 1979. Many computer editions of the game have been produced since. In Clubhouse Games for the Nintendo DS, Battleship is known as Grid Attack. It is played on a 7×7 grid, and includes slight variations, such as four player gameplay, and various ship sizes and shapes. Versions of Battleship appear as applications on numerous social networking services. Battleship was also part of Hasbro Family Game Night for the PlayStation 2 and Wii, as well as the Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade). These alter the rules, including the size of the grid (8×12 in the NES version, 8×8 in the Game Boy version), size of ships (it is common to feature a submarine that takes up a single square) and special shot missiles for each ship. For example, in the NES version, the cruiser has a five shot missile which strikes five squares in an X pattern on the grid in one turn. Submarine tracking sonar and aerial reconnaissance to spot ships are also features. A minigame version of Battleship was used in the third season of The Hub's Family Game Night, which uses a 5×5 grid and the first team to sink three ships wins the game. In 2012, the military science fiction action movie Battleship was released, which was inspired by the Milton Bradley board game, which this adaptation is an alien invasion theme movie. A version of Battleship based on the movie was released in which one side had alien ship playing pieces. In 1973 a spin off version was released under the name Sub Search. Employing a three dimensional play area, battleships drop depth charges on submarines hidden on a multi level board. In one episode of the Amazon Prime Video show The Grand Tour, presenters Richard Hammond and James May played a game of Battleship with two cranes (colored red and green) and 20 REVAi vehicles as missiles. The ships ranged from cars to campervans.

In the 1931 Salvo edition of the game, players target a specified number of squares at one time, and all of the squares are attacked simultaneously. A player may initially target five (one for each unsunk ship) squares per turn, and the amount of shots decreases when one of the player's ships are lost. One variant of Battleship allows players to decline to announce that a ship has been sunk, requiring their opponent to take further shots in order to confirm that an area is clear.