Soooo, Battleship?

Now for another game review!  Sorry, this post is not of E3 caliber, but the game is.

So, we know the movie has not been the blockbuster of the year (we haven't seen it and therefore cannot pass any judgement here on it), but this GAME version of the original is awesome.  As in, we might like it even more than the original.  Hasbro, who makes the original and also this game, is great at taking their classic boardgames and making them into easy to learn card games (anyone who plays Monopoly Deal knows what I'm talking about).  You basically have two sets of cards in two colors.  You have your "ship or miss" cards, which you lay facedown on the table, and your action cards, which allow you to try and 'hit' your opponent's ship, play more than one card at a time, heal your hit ships, etc. Use a 'hit' peg card to expose your opponent's card that's still facedown to see if it's a ship.  If it says miss, sorry, but you missed.  If it IS a ship, it will say how many 'hit' peg cards you need to sink it.  Now here's the really cool twist.  When your ship is exposed, and is still in play (as in, not sunk), you gain some sort of advantage, which your ship card will say.  It can be a healing ability, where as long as that ship is un-sunk, you can opt to remove a 'hit' peg card from any of your ships that have been hit.  Or it can be a bonus card, where you get to hold 7 action cards instead of the 5 that you'd hold otherwise, giving you more options.  As you can guess, whoever sinks all of their opponent's ships first wins the game.  I love that you get advantages when your ship is being threatened, and it can really come in handy, especially the healing power, so it gives you the chance to really come up with a good strategy on keeping yourself in the game, rather than to leave it to chance.  My only slight criticism is that there have been times when I've been stuck with cards that I couldn't use and therefore, couldn't make any moves at all (there's one boat that can only be sunk with white 'hit' peg cards, which are usually used for exposing the ships rather than sinking, so if you only have red 'hit' cards and that one ship left to sink, you're stuck).  The game's rules don't make any concessions for this.  Our house rule for getting around this borrows from poker; the person who can't make a move can opt to discard as many cards as they wish for new ones, but that's all they can do for that round.  It's not a big issue, and with that house rule it's easy to keep the game going. 

We're running low on this game right now, but the good news is that we just wrote up a HUGE reorder of Hasbro, so we'll be getting this back in stock along with a ton of new products, and of course, old favorites.  There will be superheroes!