Monday, October 5

Pencil and Paper Battleships


School holidays and I wanted to spend time with my daughters. I remember how I used to play Pencil and Paper Battleships with my brothers. I do a search and none of what I find is anything like what I used to play with my brothers. So I made up some sheets from memory and they were a big hit with my daughters.

Maybe a kind reader could tell me where we got these rules from. I am not sure whether we made them up or got them from somewhere else.

Burns Family Rules for Battleship

Place the following battle units on the “Your Ships” grid. The units can be rotated or flipped to face any direction. However they cannot be placed running in a diagonal direction. Units cannot be placed next to each other. There must be at least a one square gap orthogonally and diagonally between each unit.

The following ships must be placed in ocean squares on the grid.



The following air units must be placed on any squares on the grid.
The following ground units must be placed on land squares on the grid.



Now that all units have been placed on the grid. Each player takes turns guessing the location of their opponents “Ships”. They fire off a “shot” by calling out the ‘Letter’ and ‘Number’ of a location on the grid. Their opponent calls out ‘Miss’ if they have nothing at that location and ‘Hit’ if they do have something there. If all squares of a ‘Ship’ have been hit then the opponent announces the type of “Ship” sunk and the fact that it has been destroyed. The tally box of the ‘Ship’ (to the right of the grid) should be crossed out when a “Ship” is destroyed. The first player to destroy all their opponents ‘Ships’ wins.
Three times in a game a player can use a mega-bomb. Mega-bombs hit everything at the called location and all 8 adjacent squares. The opponent calls out any hits from the bomb and their location plus the names of any ‘Ships’ destroyed. Cross out an ‘M’ tally box each time you use a bomb.


Game Sheets 



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks. My kids love this. Medium sheets take forever though. I am only printing out small sheets now. It better than having stuck in front of the TV.