Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)My 7 and 5 year old boys "got" the concept right away. They loved building the Lego-like ships, and enjoy playing with them even when not playing Battleship. But there were some serious flaws that make this unsuitable for kids at the low end of the suggested age range.
The new gameplay lets each ship attack once for each "hit" left until it sinks. On your turn, you pick one ship and then fire as many times as it is able. Advanced rules let you modify your ships so that some have more hits, and therefore more opportunities to attack. Instead of a basic 5,4,4,3,2 configuration, you might make a 10-hit mega ship and spend the rest of your points on 2-hit escorts.
Shots are tracked on separate little plastic pegboards. To take a turn, you first put in blue pegs for each of your shots. Then you call them out one at a time for your opponent to check, while simultaneously replacing the blue pegs with red or white ones to indicate hits and misses. Your opponent then uses a different type of red peg on the Lego-ships to mark hits, except for the Submarine and Aircraft carrier which in some cases require guns/planes to be removed.
After listening to my boys play and fight for a couple of hours, here's how the concept fails in execution:
1) The board and screens are cardboard. When assembled, they do not fit back in the box, so cleanup means taking them apart. Furthermore, my kids cannot assemble them unaided, as the design requires you to fit the tabs from two pieces into a slot on the third, from opposite sides. It almost requires 3 hands. After a weekend which included 3 cycles of assembly/disassembly the tab/slot connections are already showing signs of wear.
2) Ships can easily be bumped off their flat cardboard grid spots; ships must be lifted off to adjust hit counters, and can easily be put back in the wrong place if you don't pay close attention (hard for young kids). This leads to a constant stream of accusations of cheating (not to say that you can't cheat at normal battleship, but a false accusation of cheating when your opponent made a mistake seems to be even more insulting).
3) The separate pegboard design means there are TWICE as many pegs: instead of just red and white, there are now blue and a second type of red peg. More tiny pieces to fly around, drop, etc.
4) The design of placing multiple blue pegs and then replacing with red/white pegs leads to more opportunities for mistakes. I can't count the number of times I watched my kids put down blue pegs, call them out, hear "miss, miss, miss", and then yank ALL the blue pegs to replace with white ones. At any age, correctly remembering multiple grid co-ordinates to replace the white pegs is error-prone at best. I had to repeatedly suggest that they only take one peg out at a time.
In my opinion, a good kids game is one that I can teach them to play and they will then play with minimal parental involvement. This version of Battleship does not pass the test.
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You build the game! Build your own Battleship, Aircraft Carrier, Destroyer, Submarine and PT Boat brick by brick. Build them our way, or create your own! Then, call out the shots. Hide your ships and fire your weapons! Was it a hit or a miss? Destroy all of your opponent's ships to win! Change your game by bulking up your fleet; build heavily armed super ships, any way you want! For 2 players. Ages 7 and up.
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