How Can You Improve Battleships?

Last Friday, Rob gave us our task, which was to do with the game Battleships, a game everyone has probably played at least once in their lives; it's pretty well known! In the game, played by two people, you both get a ten by ten grid and get to place certain allowed ships into it, and then you take it in turns to bomb each others grid, trying to hit each others ships. The aim of the game is to be the first one to destroy all of the other players' ships. Pretty simple, right?

Rob got us into the pairs in which we'd be working and then got us to play the game as it is usually played. Embarrassingly, we ran into a few problems in our game, mostly due to mishearing when we were telling each other what square we wanted to hit! But after a while we got there (and I lost.)

Rob then gave us the job of changing the game and adding different mechanics to it. He wanted us to try and change it three times, but unfortunately we were too slow and were only able to iterate it once, so I thought I might as well post what we did.

One annoyance we had when we were playing it the first time was how the game seemed to be a bit slowly paced for us; a lot of the time just hitting nothing. Of course in other situations one player could be hitting nothing, while the other player has hit a few ships and has figured out where they are. Our improvement could aid both a slow game where both players are hitting nothing or a game where one of the players is behind. We decided to add a mechanic that I have a problem describing, but I'll have a go! If you end up missing five times in a row, you get to use a "power up" if you will, in which you not only bomb the square you choose, but the four diagonally next to it. Here's a diagram to help you...

X |   | X
  | X |  
X |   | X

The middle one is the square you chose.

We then tested this by actually playing the game again with this mechanic added, and although it was only used once in play, by me, it definitely aided me in helping to find the other players' ship as two of the five squares I bombed on that shot hit something. One thing about this mechanic is that it could be used to help someone who is ahead get even further ahead, but they would have to fail on purpose to do this, but if they had found the location of some of the other players' ships, failing purposefully may be an easy task. Still, the main reason for this mechanic was to help the player who is behind get ahead of their opponent, as the "power up" relies on them doing badly rather than them doing well.

It would've been nice to get a chance to add some more mechanics to the game but we just didn't get the chance that lesson!