Battleship Rules

Battleship has less skill per game than almost anything else you might run a league on, which means a single game tells you very little. Match play over five or seven games, alternating who shoots first, is the minimum for a table that means anything.

Salvo variants, where you fire one shot per surviving ship each turn, add considerably more decision-making. So does allowing ships to be placed adjacent or diagonally, which widens the space of sensible placements and rewards paying attention to an opponent's habits.

Recording shots taken to win, not just the result, makes a Battleship league far more interesting. A player who consistently sinks a fleet in forty shots is genuinely better at hunting than one who takes sixty, even if they have the same record.

Using average shots-to-win as the tiebreak, or even as the primary ranking, rewards the part of the game that is actually skill: efficient search patterns and following up a hit properly.