Battleships

Before I departed for reading week one of the last sessions we had with Rob was editing the game of battleships in a group of two and creating and iterating ideas to improve on the game, the only rule was that we could only add one idea at a time we could not add multiple ideas into the game, I feel on hindsight that I think it was because if we added to many ideas to the game it may of diluted the rules and the original game to something that may not have been battleships any more.

So first of all having not played battleships in a long time our group played the game with no edits or add-ons to see how the game worked and what could be done to change the game without breaking any of the game play or rules of the game.

After a short while of playing we noticed a few things that could be changed, for an example a good player could really hide there ships in odd places on the board, and once any player has most of there fleet sunk has little chance of going back due that he has less of a chance to find all of the other opponent feet before there remaining ships are sunk.

One of the things that we changed was to add a doom square, this was a square that was added on both sides of the player grids, there more or less acted like ships on the game grid for example someone hit the doom square on my side of the grid, I would then lose the game.

The doom square was to combat a big problem that we felt was in the game, chance and time, we felt that in battleships apart from guessing the grid location of ships there would all ways be an outcome that the person who would have the biggest fleet would all ways win due to that they have more hit points in term of ship numbers and that the outcome would be inevitable that the player with the lowest amount of ships is unlikely to get any upper hand. We wanted to give players that where losing to give them a sense of hope of hitting that doom square and turning the tables and thus giving the game more of a random outcome.

Time was another problem, it took way too long to destroy the other feet for a small game like this, for a modern age like this its a bit bland and too time consuming to call out grid locations for half an hour until the opposing force's fleet is destroyed utterly the doom square allowed games that may of dragged out to end without both players quitting due to boredom or frustration.

So after explaining the doom square and after adding it to the game and then playing it, we never actually got to use it because the chance of actually getting the doom square is quite unlikely due to it taking up one space however I feel that this is good idea because its a square that you are highly unlikely going to get and it shows that its not a game breaking mechanic to add this because you are not always going to get it.