This free puzzle game fixes everything wrong with the classic Battleship

The Milton Bradley game Battleship sucks, and not just because of its sexist box art from 1967. It's essentially random guessing until you get a hit. There's no actual strategy involved beyond clustering shots around hits, making it more of a luck-based activity than a strategic game. Players spend most of their time being told "miss" while randomly guessing coordinates, making for a tedious experience. And once a player starts losing ships, they remain in a diminished state until the game ends, which isn't fun for the losing player — there's no way for a player who falls behind to make a comeback through clever play, since the core mechanic is just random guessing.

Don't let Battleships dissuade you from checking out the Battleships web app, however! This is Battleship Solitaire (also known as Bimaru or Yubotu), a single-player logic puzzle game. It has similar elements to the classic two-player Battleship game, but has a Sudoku element that makes it much more fun.

From Wikipedia:

Solitaire Battleship was invented in Argentina by Jaime Poniachik and was first featured in 1982 in the Argentine magazine Humor & Juegos. Battleship gained more widespread popularity after its international debut at the first World Puzzle Championship in New York City in 1992. Battleship appeared in Games magazine the following year and remains a regular feature of the magazine. Variants of Battleship have emerged since the puzzle's inclusion in the first World Puzzle Championship.

Here's how to play:

1. The game presents a grid with numbers along the sides indicating how many ship segments are in each row and column.
2. Different sized ships (shown at the top of the puzzle) need to be placed on the board.
3. Basic rules:

• Ships cannot touch each other, not even diagonally
• The numbers on the sides must match exactly how many ship segments are in each row/column
• All ships must be placed somewhere on the board

The creator, Luke Rissacher, designed is to be a relaxing activity that can be played while listening to podcasts or during idle time. It's free of ads and trackers, and can be played on both desktop and mobile devices.