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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Is the "no ships adjacent to other ships" rule part of the original commercial Battleship game? When I played it with my family, we didn't follow that rule, and so there was considerable scope for ambiguity about whether nearby hits were part of the same ship or not.

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This is the commercial version I remember which has less ships, a smaller board and no adjacency rules https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/battleship.pdf

I love how the game came without the labels pre-attached. Gone are the days of "some assembly required".

Of all of the assembly required, I wonder why just this one sticker on the outside. The interior had insert cards/stickers for the ocean and other inserts in the lid to look like HUD console or something [0]. So why not make thos assembly required too?

[0]https://3dprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Battleship.jp...

Not really. My young cousins got a battleship ge very similar to this as a Christmas gift last year, stickers not yet applied.

Nope, don't think any commercial version has that rule. Seems like a house rule or a misunderstanding of the official ruleset.

European versions have this rule [1]. I wasn't aware that the US version allowed adjacent ship placement until I bought a commercial version for my kid last Christmas and started looking into strategies.

1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiffe_versenken#Vorbereitung

There was no “no adjacency” rule in the official board game. This jumped out at me when I read the article; it is a significant change.

Also, the board game had a different ship length distribution; the board game is biased towards fewer, longer ships:

1x Len 5

1x Len 4

2x Len 3

1x Len 2

The length one ships in the article are weird, especially with the no adjacency rule they quickly rule out large sections of the board.

It's not weird. I played article version my whole life and never knew different ones existed. It could help you if you're lucky enough to hit it. But it also can help you if this is your last ship on the board, which happens quite often actually.

I don't know why it would be a rule but the one time I tried it, I got absolutely rekt and never did it again.

May have been because I put ALL my ships in one big blob, but typically people will fire at adjacent hits until they don't get any, so I think it's a terrible strategy anyway.

MB version appears to allow it, and I recall playing it like you did.

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