You sunk my Battleship!

Battleship has become the game to play at our house lately. Liam can't seem to get enough of it. When we first started playing, Liam was having a hard time figuring out how to call out a position or how to mark the positions the other player was calling. He's gotten pretty good at figuring out the positions now. Battleship is a long game to begin with, but playing with Liam, it seems to take an eternity. The first few times we played, there was major meltdown when he'd lose, which given his strategy is not surprising...

The top is Liam's calls on Cliff's ships. Bottom is Cliff's calls on Liam's.


Liam will begin at A-1 and on each turn will call out another number in order along until A-10. He will go row by row from top to bottom until the game is over, which usually means that the other person has found and sunk his boats. I've tried to tell him to call numbers all over the board, but he insists that his way works. Oh like mother, like son.

Some nights the game drags on into bedtime, and drastic measures are necessary to end the game. Take last night for example. Cliff will call randomly about the board, and when he finds Liam's boats, he tries to give the boy a fighting chance by not sinking them right away. Liam calls out in his typical methodic way, and by 30 minutes later, Cliff is fighting to stay awake at the board. He had found all of Liam's boats but the small patrol boat, so I helped him out a little -- "Ever-E-one needs to have a turn Once or Twice." Two quick hits and game over. This tactic seems to work more smoothly than the "time to put it away now" thing we've tried in the past. I quipped that Cliff should put all his boats in the first two rows end to end, and the game would be over much faster. Cliff replies, "Yeah, that's the day he decides to start from the bottom and go up."