A Timeless Classic

Like Risk, Battleship is a timeless classic that revolves around strategy and military warfare. While all of Risk's units are land based, Battleship, as the name would suggest, is about naval combat. You'll control boats both big and small in an effort to squash your opponents forces before they can manage to defeat yours. The premise sounds exciting and rightfully so! Not everyone will get to command a naval fleet in their lifetime!

Gameplay

The gameplay system that's found here is both simple enough for even kids to learn yet complex enough to allow room for intricate strategies. While it's certainly no chess, it's plenty capable of providing hours of intelligent fun.

Each team gets five ships that they must place on their grid. The grid is labeled by letters and numbers, which were useful in the board game version, but they just about completely lose their purpose here. In the real game (the one with the red and blue plastic containers) you would call out a grid square for an attack, where here you just click that square. Still, I like to have them there, if just for nostalgic value.

After both sides have placed their units, the battle commences! Take turns bombing different areas of your opponents grid, trying to hit his ships. If you manage to blast each section of a boat, you successfully sink their battleship (or sub, or cruise, you get the idea)!

The areas that you've unsuccessfully attacked will turn white to let you know that you've already checked there. Boats can't move once they're placed, so once an area is cleared, it remains that way.

From then on it's just a simple matter of hunting down the opposing naval fleet unit by unit and sinking them all! Once all of your opponent's units are at the bottom of the sea, you've won!

There are four different modes to choose from when playing:

• Single Shot: Each player fires once each turn
• Triple Shot: Each player gets three shots per turn, making for a speedy game
• Salvo Shot: You get shots according to how many ships you have left
• Volley Shot: Shoot until you miss

Welcome to Battleship: Fleet Command

As much as I love the original version, I think I may love this upgraded beast just a tad bit more. It takes everything that was great about the classic and makes a load of improvements. For starters, each player gets to perform three actions per turn. These actions can be attacking with one of your various weapons, moving your ships around (after they've been placed), or deploying defensive weapons, such as a torpedo net. The different ships can do different things and you can even pick different fleets to use.

The classic still retains that timeless quality and the Fleet Command variation adds a tremendous amount of depth, without sacrificing any of the elements that made the original such a great game. If you were ever any fan of Battleship, you owe it to yourself to pick this up.