Following up on a bouncing ping-pong ball version of Connect 4 released last year, Hasbro is updating another one of its classic board games to appeal to a generation that spent most of its college years bouncing plastic balls into beer-filled Solo cups. Alcohol isn’t required to play Hasbro’s new Battleship Shots, but making up your own rules for a board game is always half the run, right?
In Battleship Shots you no longer have to worry about losing those tiny little marker pegs as the mechanics of the game are fundamentally different. Each player still strategically arranges a tiny fleet of ships however they see fit, but it’s now on a much smaller 3x5 grid that remains visible to your opponent at all times. Instead of blindly calling out coordinates and hoping you score a hit, players physically bounce balls over a divider onto their opponent’s grid, hoping one lands inside a ship which counts as a hit. The winner is the first to sink their opponent’s entire fleet, or the first player to get a special red ball to land in their opponent’s tiny life raft.
Available sometime in the Fall for $20, the gameplay sounds fairly straightforward, but that’s assuming you haven’t modified the rules of Battleship Shots to increase the inebriation level and challenge. You could always expand your fleet with a bunch of Solo cup frigates, and require players to take a shot whenever they take a hit. You drunk my battleship!
[Hasbro]