Battleship

Battleship is a 2001 Macintosh take on the classic naval guessing game from HKA Software, notable for letting two captains square off either across a local network or over the internet rather than only at the same machine, and bringing the long-standing pencil-and-paper standard into a tidy Mac OS window.

The classic game

Each player secretly arranges a fleet on a hidden grid, then takes turns calling coordinates to find and sink the opponent's ships before their own fleet is destroyed.

Networked play

The Mac build's distinguishing feature is its support for play over a network or the internet, bringing the pencil-and-paper standard to remote opponents on the OS 9 era desktop.

Era and audience

Released near the end of the classic Mac OS lifecycle, it joins the wave of small shareware and freeware adaptations of paper and board games that filled out the Mac casual catalog.