Battleship

Battleship is a 2001 Macintosh implementation of the classic naval guessing game, developed by HKA Software. It hews closely to the familiar rules of the paper-and-pencil and Milton Bradley editions, but adds modern conveniences for the late classic Mac era, including support for play over a local network or across the internet.

Gameplay

Each player secretly places a fleet on a top-down grid, then takes turns calling out coordinates to fire on the opposing board. Hits, misses and sunk ships are tracked automatically, and the first player to sink the entire enemy fleet wins.

Networking

The standout feature is built-in network play. Two Macs can face off over a LAN or over the open internet, removing the need for hot-seat play and making it well suited to AIM-era online matchmaking.

Compatibility

Battleship is a Carbonized PowerPC application, so it runs natively on Mac OS X as well as on Mac OS 9, provided that CarbonLib 1.3 or later is installed. The download is a roughly 1 MB StuffIt archive.

Publisher

HKA Software released Battleship as one of several small board-game ports targeting the OS 9 / OS X transition window, when many users wanted classic family games that worked on both systems from a single binary.