Historically,
Battleship has been a guessing game played by two people. It is
known throughout the world as a pencil and paper game and predates
World War I in this form. It was invented by Clifford Von Wickler
in the early 1900s, but he never patented the game and it was soon
published by Milton Bradley Company in 1943 as the pad-and-pencil
game "Broadsides, the Game of Naval Strategy". Later, the game
became known simply as, "Battleship". In 1977 Milton Bradley
released a computerized Electronic Battleship, followed in 1989 by
Electronic Talking Battleship.
In Battleship (and geocaching Battleship), there are 5 ships of
various sizes arranged and hidden on a 10 x 10 grid. Each
grid location is identified by a letter (A-J) and a number
(1-10). An example of a grid location might be
“A3” or “F10”. There are 100 possible
locations or caches. Your task is to locate and sink these ships by
searching for geocaches that represent the grid locations.
Many of the caches will be “misses” just like the like
the Milton Bradley game. A few will be
“hits”. Each hit will give you partial
coordinates for the ship it represents. Once you have made
all the hits on a particular ship, you will have all the
coordinates for that ship. You then must find the mystery
cache for that ship in order to officially sink it. The
mystery cache for each of the five ships will have partial
coordinates for a mystery final. Once you have sunk all the ships,
you will have acquired the coordinates for the final. When you find
the final you officially win the
game!
The five
ships that you must sink:
aircraft
carrier (5 hits will sink it)
battleship
(4)
destroyer
(3)
submarine
(3)
patrol boat
(2)
Note the example
image above:
Each ship is placed either horizontally or vertically
but never diagonally.
Ships do not overlap one another.
Game Examples
Let’s say you find cache C6 and it's a
“miss”. There will be no coordinates contained
within. It is simply another traditional cache find.
Try again at another Battleship cache.
However, if you find cache E5 and it is a
“hit”, you will find a card listing a ship type and
partial coordinates for that ship's puzzle/mystery
cache. Let's continue with this example. If it
was the aircraft carrier in the example image above, you know that
it would require 4 more hits to sink. Your next search should
be either D5 (on the grid space located directly above), F5
(directly below), E4 (to the left side) or E6 (to the right
side). Once the aircraft carrier is sunk, you will have the
full coordinates for “You Sank My Aircraft
Carrier”. Please note, the caches themselves are
not hidden in grid pattern. However, you should use
the grid provided to keep track of your finds and understand how
the ships are laid out. By the way, "hit" caches are traditional
finds just like "misses".
Game Rules
Please do not indicate in your log when you
find a hit. You don't want to give your opponents this free
information!
Good
Luck!
