Battleship: Fallen On Hard Times

Created by Micah Visser, Daniel Jordan and Frankie Siklos

Battleship is a popular household game with many siblings or close friends having plenty of opportunities to play together after school or in the summer. It is odd though that we encourage young children to bomb each other using a plastic play-radar and calling out coordinates. It seems to completely ignore the fact that the players are killing the crew on those ships and must have an underlying conflict that was the catalyst for the war being represented. The original gameplay loop of Battleship really just boils down to a turn-based math/geometry puzzle, but they embrace the aesthetic of war so much without actually exploring ethical dilemmas with it. It is a very odd design dissonance, where they drive sales through the visualization of military equipment, but they don't give opportunities to explore the ramifications of war with anywhere near the same level of significance.

Battleship: Fallen On Hard Times is an expansion with an added ruleset and components to the original Battleship game published by Hasbro.  It cannot be played without a copy of the original game, and mechanisms assume that you have a modern copy with the 10x10 grid, though simple reinterpretations of rules on the cards can be made to accommodate older editions that were 11x9 and other aspect ratios.

This game modification is designed to question the ethical decision-making of the original game and the players who participate in the simulated conflict. Will you behave differently in this war game if you have civilians to feed and supervisors to please? We hope to give an experience that encourages people to question the role of political powers in warfare, the responsibility of people in military leadership roles, and the reaction to those positions of power regular people have when they are thrust into that authority.

With this new content, you maintain the health of your country while balancing resources between the people and the war effort. You can spend resources to repair your ships and stay afloat, but if you don't want your citizens starving, you need to leave resources for them to use. Over time, keeping up with the objectives of the Government while caring for your citizens might be hard, as the players impair each other's resource supply and war engines. A ceasefire is an option, but both sides need to work toward that conclusion, and attempting to start that conversation by putting your weapons down can leave you vulnerable to the other player if they choose to take advantage of your peaceful intentions.

Cards show the deterioration of your country and citizens' quality of life as the war continues:

They also are used as an objective system, with collaborative and combative goals changing the way that the players engage with the game and the other mechanisms within it:

    

The objectives will cover generalized topics in war, like propaganda, veteran disability and memorials, giving players a chance to decide what they are comfortable with and what kind of leader they want to be in this fictional conflict. Where does your moral compass lie, or does the duty to serve the military surpass the values of the individual? These new objects are directed at questioning that line of thinking to help players understand different perspectives.