The history of Battleship

A game that started on paper

Battleship began as a pencil-and-paper game, and it is old enough that nobody can name an inventor. Versions were played in Europe in the early twentieth century, and it became widespread among soldiers during the First World War — two grids on a sheet of squared paper needs no equipment, no board and no light.

In Russia it is Morskoi Boi (Морской бой, "sea battle") and is still played on paper today, usually with the no-touching rule that makes the deduction harder. French, German and Polish traditions have their own names and slightly different fleets.

The first commercial versions were pads of pre-printed grids. Salvo, published in the United States in 1931, is the best documented, and the name survives as the standard term for the multiple-shots variant.

1967: Milton Bradley and the plastic case

The version everybody pictures — a hinged plastic case, a vertical screen, red and white pegs — was published by Milton Bradley in 1967. Like their Connect Four grid seven years later, the physical object did the rule-teaching: you cannot see your opponent's grid, you cannot forget where you shot, and the pegs make bookkeeping automatic.

Electronic Battleship followed in 1977, one of the first mass-market board games with a microprocessor. It kept score, made explosion noises, and — significantly — let one person play against the machine, which paper Battleship could never do.

The game as a mathematics problem

Battleship's afterlife is academic. It is a clean, well-defined search problem — find 17 occupied squares among 100, given constraints on how they can be arranged — and it has become a standard teaching example in probability, information theory and algorithm design.

The headline results that any player can use:

• Random shooting needs about 95 shots on average — essentially the whole board.
• Hunt and target — random until a hit, then work outwards — drops that to roughly 65.
• Parity hunting — only firing at squares of one colour, since the smallest ship covers two adjacent squares — gets to about 50.
• Probability density — recomputing, for every square, how many possible remaining ship placements cover it — reaches about 40.

The same structure appears in radar search, in medical screening and in the theory of optimal guessing games, which is why a children's game keeps turning up in textbooks.

Battleship in culture

The game's phrase — "you sank my battleship" — entered ordinary English through the 1960s and 1970s advertising campaigns, and it is now used far outside the game. In 2012 the brand was made into a Hollywood science-fiction film, an adaptation of a game with no characters, no setting and no story, which is a landmark of a sort.

More usefully, Battleship remains the standard first programming project for teaching grids, state and simple AI: implement the board, then implement hunt-and-target, then implement probability density and watch your shot count fall. The computer opponent on this site does exactly that — the Recruit hunts loosely, while the Admiral uses parity and switches to targeting the moment it lands a hit.

Common questions