Sea Command: Battleships

It's funny how war is such a common theme among children's toys, at least for those popular when we were lads. There were GI Joe figurines, buckets of endless green army men, countless plastic pistols and machine guns and, of course, Battleship.

While the paper and pencil version has fans of all ages, from the tender age of eight or nine Battleship the board game finds itself either: a) relegated to the bottom of the pile whilst other more hands-on war toys are given precedence, or b) played regularly, but only ever for as long as it takes to get bored of sticking all of the ships onto one side of the board and pretending to be some sort of über navy warlord. As such, Battleship doesn't get the patience and time that it deserves.

For well-adjusted types who have long since built up an immunity to the attention sapping effects of food colouring and lost the sort of imagination that makes buckets of green army men fun to play with (who are we kidding here?), the Battleship concept is arguably better suited to being a mobile game for adults than it is a board game for children.

Sea Command: Battleships is a game whose developer knows this, as it is exactly the same as the tabletop version in every respect but the name.

A quick recap of the rules for those of you who used your Battleship board exclusively as a tray to eat Marmite on toast and drink Ribena from. Battleship is a simple game requiring nothing but patience and educated guess work. You and your opponent each have a grid onto which you place a selection of naval vehicles such as ships, personnel carriers, submarines and frigates. You each then take it in turns to pick coordinates from the grid to bomb your opponent's fleet, the position of which of course you cannot see.

Each member of your fleet takes up a certain amount of squares on the grid and you need to hit all of the squares that any one unit occupies in order to sink that vessel. The first player to sink their opponent's entire fleet is the winner.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? And it is, but what makes the concept so addictive is the tactical decision making involved in guessing the whereabouts of your opponent's craft, based on their size, what you've already managed to sink, and where you have already missed.

Sea Command: Battleships gets all of the fundamentals right straight off the bat. Controls are simple (taken care of by the stock '2', '4', '6', '8' keys for movement and the '5' for shooting set-up) and instead of naming grid references, you simply move the cursor onto the desired space and press fire.

What makes this mobile version so well rounded is the modest bevy of thoughtful extras included in the package. Besides the standard mode there's an option to play in a series of scenario games, which amount to limiting your own and the computer's fleet to a certain quantity of a single type of vehicle, calling for a different tactical approach.

The option to manually deploy or have the computer choose your fleet layout is also welcome, especially if you want to rush straight into the action.

The icing on the cake, though, is the Bluetooth multiplayer option, which really adds longevity to this package once you've tired of playing against the AI. Allied with some clean and clear visuals, and it's easy to forgive Sea Command: Battleships its repetitive sound effects.

Not one for the emerging breed of more serious mobile gamers, then, but considered as a well-presented casual game with a nostalgic twist, Sea Command: Battleships is a hard title to fault. Hit.