You Sunk My Battleship!

Battleships - Iterations

~ Fri 25th Oct - Rob  ~

We were tasked with play testing a game called "Battleships". I widely known game throughout the world and has come in many shapes and forms over its life span. Once we had tested and made notes on how the game works we were tasked with changing, adding or removing mechanics from its original structure to better understand how simple changes can affect a game.

I was grouped with Tom Andrews for this and we begun with playing the game in its original form. If I remember correctly I lost but that's not the point. But that was the goal...one must win and one must lose.

We found the original game to be very entertaining despite it being a very old and been played 100 times before, truly a game that has stood the test of time. The mechanics I enjoyed and ultimately made the game are :-

• Freedom to place you ships anywhere within the board
• Different sized ships
• Not being able to see your opponents ship positions
• Reading your opponent
• Fair game play, no special treatment for achieving something

The only thing that I didn't find enjoyable was the two square ship that I couldn't seem to find which resulted in me losing the game.

We discussed what mechanics and rules within the structure of the game we enjoyed and disliked. We decided on making a few changes, some not so radical and other a little more so but given we only had a short period of time to achieve making changes we had to throw all the changes in at once but in an ideal world I would of made slight changes gradually to see the outcome. The changes we made were :-

• Removed the two square ship and replaced it with a two by three square ship
• Increased the grid size to 12 x 12 (original 10 x 10)
• Upon destroying a opponents ship, you were able to salvage it and move it to your fleet. After doing so your opponent has the choice to re shuffle his/her ships on the grid

The first 2 changes are simple and worked well but didn't really add anything to the game play nor take anything away. Our final change would of made the game very interesting and made the game a little more interactive with the users with the ever changing positions of the ships but as we were paper prototyping we found that we would of used a huge amount of resources. If we had been using the game grid and piece from the real game it would of simplified the change a lot.