The History of Fleet Battle
A pencil-and-paper guessing game turned world-famous plastic-and-pegs classic - and, here, a generic version of it under a different name.
A World War I-Era Paper Game
Long before any company sold it in a box, soldiers and schoolchildren were already playing a paper-and-pencil guessing game with roots going back to around the First World War: each player secretly marks ship shapes on a grid of their own, then the two take turns calling out grid coordinates, marking hits and misses on a second grid to track the enemy's fleet.
Games of this family were sometimes called "Salvo", and countless variations on the grid size, fleet composition and calling-out procedure circulated informally for decades before anyone standardized or sold them commercially.
A Commercial Pad-and-Pencil Game
Starting in the 1930s, several publishers began selling the paper version as a printed pad-and-pencil game under various names, formalizing the fleet sizes and the grid-and-coordinates format that still defines the game today, well before any pegboard or plastic ship ever existed.
The Pegboard Edition
The version most people recognize today, sold under the trademarked name "Battleship", was published by the Milton Bradley Company starting in 1967, turning the pencil-and-paper original into a plastic two-board game with pegs to mark hits and misses.
Later editions added molded plastic ships to sit on the pegboard grids, movie and video game adaptations, and electronic talking versions - but the underlying mechanic never changed: guess hidden grid positions through a sequence of shots, reported back as hits or misses.
This Version
PaperGames implements the classic grid-guessing naval combat mechanic under the generic name "Fleet Battle" rather than the trademarked name "Battleship", matching how this collection already handles a few other games built around well-known trademarked names: Reversi instead of Othello, Four in a Row instead of Connect Four, Wall Maze instead of Quoridor, and Card Tactics instead of Onitama.