Armada Battleship Game

Armada Battleship Game was a Java-based implementation of the classic Battleship guessing game. Its objective matched the board game exactly: sink the opponent's ships before the opponent sinks one's own.

Building the game as a Java applet meant it could run directly inside a web browser without a separate download or installer, a common way casual browser games of the era, including several single-player Battleship clones, were distributed and played.

Placing Ships

A match opened with a placement phase. Clicking "Place Ships Randomly" let the computer position a player's remaining ships automatically, or a player could place them by hand: selecting a ship name from a list beside the board, clicking an open square to mark one end of that ship, then clicking one of the resulting highlighted squares to mark the other end. This repeated until every ship on the fleet's roster had been placed on the board. A ship already on the board could be removed and repositioned by clicking any part of it, and on-screen instructions below the board updated continuously to show which actions were available to the player at any given moment during setup.

Playing the Game

Once placement was complete, a player clicked open squares on the opponent's board to try to find and destroy its ships, registering either a hit or a miss on each attempt. Once every square of a given ship had been hit, that ship appeared on the board and was marked as sunk. The computer opponent fired back under the same turn structure, with the human player always moving first and turns alternating between the two sides from there on. The first side to sink every one of the opponent's ships won the match. As in the board game, the type of a ship that had been hit was not revealed until the last of its squares was struck, so a player had to infer a ship's length and orientation from the pattern of hits alone.

Starting a New Game

A win or a loss triggered an on-screen image; clicking it started a fresh match. Losing also revealed the full layout of the computer's surviving ships, letting a player see what had gone undetected and compare it against the guesses that had, or had not, come close.

A Different Extension of the Same Idea

Armada kept the classic Battleship format almost unchanged, down to a static grid and a single win condition. BattleFleet: Pacific War built on the same underlying idea in a very different direction, letting an entire fleet move across a large map instead of sitting fixed on a 10x10 board.

Movement across that larger map was illustrated separately: , and the game organized that movement around four playable navies.