Battleships! Enhancing the rules

The game of Battleships landed in many childhoods and it not surprising how well children and adults took to this as, I propose, the target audiences were preschoolers(4-6) and kids(7-9), and I will explain why I propose this.

Trying to summarise this game in a just a few I would have to say guessing, chance, luck and logic. These elements of what I perceive to be the core foundation of interaction solely relates to the types of game play kids and preschoolers often engage in and enjoy.


The Game-play and Rules

Battleships is a turn-based game between two players who, before the start, have to set their ships position in secrecy to the opposing player, who is not supposed to know the locations until a successful declaration of attack by coordinates("B-9", "Hit!"/"Miss") is undergone. This has already explored the creative nature of children as it allows some self-found logic for their strategy of placements and exploration of what patterns they like setting, indulging in personalisation as opposed to direct logic (Kids can be stubborn apparently).

Guessing, chance and luck I believe play a huge part in this game, as who can tell if one person will always hit and the other always miss, there is no real formula for deciding the outcome, unless perhaps you are playing against Derren Brown.

This can lead to a few emergent emotions from playing and the outcomes, often invoking Anticipation - between turns, Impatience - from consecutive misfires,  Frustration - from unbalanced streaks, Jestering - From 'lucky' streaks.


Iterations

In order to mitigate some possible chances of gamer-rage once someone has settled into continuous gaming whilst losing I decided to test some minor additions in order to alter some of the emotional responses from playing the game. In this I looked at changing logic to aid in increasing anticipation and jesting. The logic-enhancing tool I tested was a simple Deflector Shield. The rule addition is simple, "Once you have successfully sunk an opponents ship you gain 1 expendable Deflector Shield, which you may activate in response to the opponents declaration, this replaces the need to declare Miss or Hit."

After playing this game a few times with the new addition I found their was more strategy in using the deflector shield other than I originally thought. Since you can activate the shield on any coordinate, not just on your ship(which would still give your positions away), it was often used to divert attention around that coordinate, often used to deceive as you would think "Their ship must be around there as they just used their only Shield to save it".

I found this was a success in minor attuning emotional responses from the game, it still remains the same core game-play but with something other than turn-based ship finding, it now involved deception!