My Electronic Battleship Review

Fire on B3…….Bam! I sunk your aircraft carrier! Booya! Ah, the thrill of victory. I remember fondly playing the game of battleship as a child. It was easy and simple to understand. The game took a bit of luck to win though. You would randomly shout out coordinates to your friend and hope to hit something on his/her board. Once you hit a ship though, BAM!, it was over for that ship. Some time ago, Harbro released an electronic version of the game called Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission. I didn’t even know about it until my wife suggested getting it for my son on Christmas.

Board Games Usually Bore You? Not Battleship!

These days, I’m not a big fan of board games or really any games in general that don’t require a controller. However, I decided to give this one a chance since the word “electronic” was in the name (and the fact that my son begged me to play it with him,lol). Surprisingly I had a lot of fun playing this game.

You can play the traditional “battleship“ game here, called “Territorial Waters”. This game style was fun, but reminded me how long it takes to play battleship. It’s basically a lot of guessing until you get a hit. The real fun started when we used “Advanced Weapons”. During this mode, you can use jets (which are placed on your aircraft carrier, cool right?) and submarines to scan areas on the other player’s board. Once scanned, the game tells you which positions contain a ship and which are empty. This makes the game move along a lot faster. What’s even cooler is the other player can shoot down your jet with an “anti-air” missile if they can figure out where the jet is located. Awesome right?

Battleships AND Battle Jets!

Losing a jet can crush you when playing with advanced weapons. A jet has the ability to scan an area you specify on the other player’s board. If the jet locates a ship, it can immediately fire upon it. This is why jets are an important tool to hang on to in this mode. You’re blind without them, just back to guessing. In addition, advanced weapons mode offers a limited number of special attacks from each ship type. A submarine can shoot a missile from one end of the board to the other. The battleship can use a tomahawk missile and take out an entire ship!

You can also play other game types, such as salvo. When playing salvo, you can fire as many shots as you have ships left. For example, if you only have 3 ships left, you can fire 3 shots before your turn ends. This speeds the game tremendously.

As you can see, I had a BLAST playing this game with my son. It’s nice spending time with him not in front of the TV. I would highly recommend the new version of battleship to parents looking for quality fun with their kids.