Fleet Battle

Fleet Battle is played in a chart room below decks. Two admiralty charts lie side by side on an oiled oak desk: yours, with the fleet drawn on it, and the enemy's, blank cream water from A1 to J10. Drag a carrier, a battleship, a cruiser, a submarine and a destroyer onto your chart, tap one to turn her broadside, or press auto-place and let the quartermaster do it. Then you start calling squares, and every answer goes into the paper — a bone peg where the shell threw up spray, a red peg where it found steel.

The opponent is not a random number generator. The Captain sweeps the water on a parity lattice so no ship can slip between his shots, and the moment he draws blood he works outwards along the line until the hull is finished. The Admiral has a harder brain again: before every shot he counts, for every square still open, how many ways each of your surviving ships could still be lying across it, and fires at the square that is most likely to be wet steel. Give him a straight line of hits and he will run it to both ends. He needs a little over forty shots to clear a board, so a careless fleet is a short game.

Play a quiet duel against either officer, or hand the device back and forth in the two players mode, where a curtain drops between turns so nobody peeks at the other fleet. Salvo changes the arithmetic completely: you fire one shot for every ship you still have afloat, so the first hull you lose costs you a gun and the last one leaves you plinking away one square at a time. Wins, games played and your current streak are kept in the browser, so the desk remembers how the campaign is going.