Battleship is one of the most iconic and well-known board games out there. Though it’s not a terribly sophisticated game, it still sets itself apart from the movement-along-a-path mechanics that dominate the vast majority of classic board games, managing to incorporate a bit of strategy by allowing players to determine where their ships are and how to search for their opponent’s.
While there are some mathematically discoverable facts about how to search efficiently, the real core of this game is anticipating your opponent’s specific strategy and ensuring they’re unable to anticipate yours. Whatever it is you like about Battleship, be it the hiding-and-guessing gameplay or the naval combat theme, there’s probably something on this list that’s going to appeal to you.
Battleship With Planes
An expanded version of the classic game
Though it’s only slightly different than the baseline game, similar enough that it should probably be regarded as an edition rather than a separate title, this game is definitely the version of Battleship you should get if you do not currently own one.
We don’t usually include the game itself on theseGames For People Who Likelists, but this version of Battleship manages to be just different enough to count as its own title, despite being essentially the same game. Indeed, it’s identical to the original battleship, except that an additional unit, the plane, has been added.
In practice, this just means there’s one extra ship to place and hunt for. It’s three units long, and the fact that it’s supposed to be a plane doesn’t make it play any differently than the submarine or the destroyer. However, it still adds visual variety to the game board, and its presence allows games to last a little bit longer and slightly shrinks the uneventful lulls that tend to occur when you’re searching blindly for an enemy ship.
Electronic Battleship Reloaded
An advancement of the classic game
Another game that’s similar to the original Battleship, this game adds some interesting electronic functionality, and, more importantly, gives each player a couple of advanced attacks they can use to search for and eliminate ships more efficiently.
This game is likewise mostly identical to the original Battleship. Indeed, a fully identical recreation of the original game is one of its available game modes. The electronic nature of this product adds a bit of interesting flair to it and makes it possible to play alone against a computer, but the real draw of this product comes from its advanced game mode.
Where our last product added a new ship, this one adds fancy new attack moves. Instead of making a normal move on their turn, players can choose to fire a torpedo, which automatically hits a random ship and reveals its location, a salvo, which fires several shots in a line, or a radar, which scans a larger area for ships, but doesn’t do any damage. Each of these special moves is a limited resource you must use wisely. If you like Battleship, but wish it were more complicated and had more going on, this product is for you.
Plunder: A Pirate’s Life
It’s like Battleship fused with Catan
This board game simulates various aspects of a pirate’s life, including the conquest of islands, the extraction of resources from them, the burying and discovering of treasure, and, the mmost relevent to us, ship-to-ship combat.
Plunder: A Pirate’s Life is a moderately complex simulation game designed toreplicate several aspects of the pirate experience, from seeking buried treasure to evading storms, conquering islands, and engaging in ship-to-ship combat. Each of this game’s players controls a pirate ship. These ships conquer islands to obtain resources, and use those resources to do a variety of things, including combat one another. As they do so, their hit points are tracked with pegs.
The combat here is more complicated, but the experience feels like Battleship in a ton of little ways, making this another great choice for gamers who would like a more sophisticated version of it.
Shipyard
Manage a shipping business
This economic game places you in charge of a ship, and tasks you with managing it using a wide variety of mechanics that give you access to different actions, different ship parts, and different crew members.
This European style board gameallows you to simulate some more peaceful naval activities. It places you in charge of your own shipyard, has you build and crew your own ship, and tasks you with a variety of actions in pursuit of its various sources of victory points. There are various commodities, canals, crew members, ship parts, and other elements to obtain, and the game eschews traditional turn orders for a more dynamic system that rewards players for taking a variety of different actions and punishes them for spamming the same one over and over.
Snap Ships Tactics
An excellent space combat game
This miniature battling game has players design and customize their own squadron of spaceships and use their various features in a strategic battle. If you’re here for the action of naval combat, this game is for you.
This highly tactical, intricate miniatures wargame tasks you with building your own squadron of ships and leading them in combat against those of your opponent. When we say that you build your ships, we mean this literally. The game doesn’t come with fully-assembled ships, but rather has you use a variety of parts to assemble them into custom vessels.
Once assembled, the ships face off in a relatively traditional miniatures wargame, complete with varying types of terrain, measured movement, and a variety of abilities. This game also uses dice to resolve some actions. It’s a complicated game, but it uses that complexity well. If you’re looking for a sophisticated tabletop combat experience between two groups of warships, this is the game for you.
Whitehall Mystery
A game of hide and seek in the dark London streets
This classic hidden movement game casts most of the players as detectives, and one of them as Jack the Ripper himself, and places them in a hide-and-seek game. Jack must move carefully to avoid being caught.
The games on this list so far have been about ships, giving them a thematic relationship with Battleship despite the fact that they have very different mechanics. However, some of you probably love Battleship for its mechanics rather than its theme. If this is the case, you’ll like Whitehall.
Whitehall is ahidden movement game, a genre of game where one or more players move around a board searching for a single opponent whose location and movement aren’t common knowledge. This game isn’t as simple as Battleship, but the fact that the hidden player can move adds a ton of tension, which goes well with its dark theme.
Sniper Elite: The Board Game
Simulate another type of warfare
Based on the hit video game series, Sniper Elite casts one player as a devious sniper, and tasks everyone else with hunting him down before he can accomplish his objectives.
Here we have another hidden movement game, this one with a military, though not a naval, theme. Based on a popular series of video games,Sniper Elitecasts one player as a sniper skulking around the board accomplishing various objectives and attacking his pursuers. The rest are those pursuers, tasked with controlling a handful of soldiers and using their abilities to track the sniper down.
This game has a lot going on, but in a very good way. Both sides have a lot of tools to use in a variety of interesting and creative ways, and the asymmetrical gameplay is very well-balanced.
FAQ
Is Battleship just a guessing game?
Like many of the most well-known board games, Battleship is pretty simple in a way that can make it feel like it doesn’t have much going on. Some of these games, like Candyland, genuinely are as vapid as they seem, but others, like Battleship, can be a bit more than meets the eye. From a highly technical, theoretical, mathematical perspective, Battleship is a guessing game with a high luck component. However, dismissing it due to this ignores the psychological element of the game. It may be relatively simple to work out the ideal strategy against a hypothetical opponent who places their ships randomly, but when two humans play, both of them are trying to guess each other’s strategies while making sure their own are surprising. This leads to a lot of interesting reverse psychology, and is what makes this game work despite its simplicity.
How old is Battleship?
The modern version of the game was published in 1967 by Milton Bradly. That was the first version to use the plastic board and pegs we know today, but earlier versions of the same idea using pencil and paper or other mechanisms have existed for much longer, dating back at least to World War I, and possibly even to the nineteenth century.
