A guessing game on ruled paper.

Battleship existed as a way of playing long before it was a product. English Wikipedia describes it as a two-player guessing game played on ruled grids, paper or board, on which each player marks a fleet of warships hidden from the other; players take turns calling “shots” at squares in the opponent’s grid, and the aim is to sink the opposing fleet. It dates the pencil-and-paper game to the First World War. The Strong National Museum of Play, announcing the game’s induction into the National Toy Hall of Fame in November 2025, described it as originally a pencil-and-paper game whose inspiration began with similar two-person strategy games in the late nineteenth century, and said various manufacturers printed paper versions beginning in the 1930s.

English Wikipedia names Salvo as a commercial version, published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company, citing a Milwaukee Journal report from July of that year. In Salvo, a player fired several shots at once — initially one for each surviving ship — and the number of shots fell as ships were lost. The same article names other pad games of the 1930s and 1940s: the Strathmore Company’s Combat: The Battleship Game, Milton Bradley’s Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy, Maurice L. Freedman’s Warfare Naval Combat, and a version called Wings from Strategy Games Co. that pictured aircraft over the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of them, it says, consisted of pre-printed pads of paper.

The basic format was already fixed in those pads. Each player works with two grids: one on which they place their own ships and record the opponent’s shots, and one on which they track their own shots. English Wikipedia says the grids are usually ten squares by ten, with each square identified by a letter and a number, so a shot can be called aloud as a coordinate. Ships occupy a run of consecutive squares, placed horizontally or vertically, and may not overlap.

Milton Bradley, Hasbro and a plastic fleet.

The name now attached to the game belongs to the plastic edition. Milton Bradley, the games company that English Wikipedia says was founded by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1860, issued its version of Battleship in 1967. Military Times, writing in November 2023, quoted University of Waterloo research on the edition: rather than relying on pencil and paper, the box included two plastic trays, pegs, plastic ships and printed instructions. The Strong’s 2025 announcement said that television advertising played a part in the success of the 1967 plastic edition.

Milton Bradley kept developing the game. English Wikipedia records a spin-off called Sub Search in 1973, with a three-dimensional play area in which battleships dropped depth charges on submarines hidden on a multi-level board; a computerised Electronic Battleship in 1977; and Electronic Talking Battleship in 1989. The Strong says the game was computerised in 1979, and Wikipedia dates a version for the Compucolor II computer to that year.

Ownership changed in 1984. The New York Times reported on 5 May 1984 that Hasbro Industries, a toy maker based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire the Milton Bradley Company, which it described as a rival maker of toys and games. English Wikipedia says Milton Bradley was merged with Hasbro’s other games subsidiary, Parker Brothers, in 1998 to form Hasbro Games, and that the Milton Bradley name continued to be used as a brand until 2009. Battleship has been a Hasbro game since the 1984 purchase.

The fleet itself has been revised under Hasbro. English Wikipedia says the 1990 Milton Bradley rules specified a carrier of five squares, a battleship of four, a cruiser and a submarine of three each and a destroyer of two, and that in 2002 Hasbro renamed the three-square cruiser the destroyer and introduced a two-square ship called the Patrol Boat. The same rules list Salvo as a variation for more experienced players.

The game reached the cinema in 2012. The Strong’s curator Mirek Stolee said that year Universal Pictures and Hasbro released a film called Battleship, which he described as very loosely based on the game, and Wikipedia records a tie-in edition in which one side had alien ship playing pieces. On 6 November 2025 The Strong announced that the National Toy Hall of Fame had inducted Battleship, together with slime and Trivial Pursuit, as its class of 2025.

Design and documentation.

A board game brand is carried less by any single object than by a set of printed parts that travel together: a box lid, a board, a handful of tokens or dice, and a folded sheet of rules. The lid does most of the public work, because it sits on a shelf and has to name the game, show what kind of play is inside and carry the maker’s mark, often at a size that reads from across a shop.

Inside, the board turns the game’s logic into a layout of spaces, tracks and colour-coded zones, and the tokens, cards and score pads repeat that colour code in miniature. Rule sheets are the quiet part of the identity, with their own headings, diagrams and house style, and they are often revised when a game is reissued.

Game names also change hands more often than their players notice, so the company printed on a lid may not be the one that first published it. Each guide separates what dated, independent sources record about a game’s origins, owners and editions from what the companies say about themselves.

Coordinates, pegs and a five-ship fleet.

The Battleship identity is built from a vocabulary that every edition shares. One part is the coordinate: a square named by a letter and a number, called aloud across the table. English Wikipedia describes the same lettered and numbered squares on the paper grids, and the 1967 edition carried them over to plastic trays.

Another part is the peg. English Wikipedia says that in the pegboard version a hit is marked with a red peg and a miss with a white one, on both the player’s own ocean grid and the tracking grid used to record shots at the opponent. In the paper version, the same article says, hits and misses are marked in pencil instead.

A third part is the fleet. Named ships of fixed lengths — carrier, battleship, destroyer, submarine and patrol boat in the 2002 rules — give the game its cast, and the title ship gives the game its name. The sinking of each one is announced aloud by its owner.

For a design guide, Battleship shows how a game can turn a grid of letters and numbers into a recognisable look, with colour reserved for meaning: red for a hit, white for a miss. Compare it with Yahtzee, another game that came into Hasbro through Milton Bradley, and Trivial Pursuit, which joined the National Toy Hall of Fame alongside it in 2025. For this guide we use ocean blue, hull grey and hit red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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