Battleship Chess Game

Battleship Chess was a computer game adaptation of the Battleship idea that put players in command of a fleet of warships, arranged and fought in a manner resembling chess rather than the grid-guessing format of the classic board game. Each warship carried different weapons for surface and underwater targets, and the opponent's ships stayed hidden on the board, to be located by guesswork as in the source material.

Setup and Progression

At the start of a match, a player chose between one, five or ten battles, picked a nationality for the forces involved, and set a difficulty level among three options: Beginner, Intermediate and Expert. Play then proceeded through five chapters, each built around multiple battles and introducing a new ship type as the game went on, for a roster described in the game's own materials as seven types of warships. Five kinds of special zones and four types of card faces rounded out the options, and the game supported both a single offline match for one or two players and online multiplayer.

Introducing one new warship type per chapter meant the full seven-piece roster was never available from the first battle: the earliest chapters worked with a smaller set of ships before the later types entered play, giving each difficulty level a different early-game feel depending on which pieces a player already had access to.

Presentation

The game's own promotional description characterized its graphics as simple, with a primitive design for ships, water and islands, paired with music the copy called well suited to the action and sound effects it described as basic but appropriate; the audio could be switched off entirely if a player found it distracting. In-game options covered screen mode, resolution, music, sound effects and card face, and the pairing of a tutorial, easy controls and several difficulty levels was presented as the reason the game stayed approachable despite its plain look. The four card-face options let a player change the visual style of the interface to suit personal taste, alongside the screen-mode and resolution settings.

System Requirements

A Different Extension of the Same Idea

Where Battleship Chess reworked the classic guessing game into chess-like piece movement, BattleFleet: Pacific War took the opposite route, keeping the hidden-fleet guessing mechanic but letting the fleet move freely across a large naval map instead of a chessboard-style layout. Both titles, in different ways, answered the same question a static Battleship board leaves unaddressed: what happens once a ship is allowed to reposition.

For Windows 98, XP, ME, NT and 2000, that map-based movement looked like this: