Blogger Steven Johnson took a close look at a couple of the classic games of our childhood and came to a sobering conclusion: games like Battleship and Candyland require virtually no real decision-making whatsoever. I wonder, does this makes them any more or less enjoyable?
...there is absolutely nothing about the initial exploratory sequence of Battleship that requires anything resembling a genuine decision. It is a roulette wheel. A random number generator could easily stay competitive for the first half...And Battleship might as well be Battleship Potemkin compared to something like Candy Land, which was fiendishly designed to prevent the player from ever having to make a single decision while playing the game...
Link - via boingboing
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by mrbabyman.
In that game, only the first step is random. Once you get a "hit" then it's not random - you have to explore the statistically most probable places to sink your enemy's battleship. The initial randomness is very much like real life ...
Also when choosing the diagonals try to find the big boats first (ex : A1+A5 for the 5 squares boat and so on. In that example choosing A3 then clears all boats on this half line).
Then you have to know your adversary : will he always spread his fleet or be more creative?
Like Edwards, I like people playing randomly :D
I enjoyed trivia or strategy games a lot more.
Speaking of trivia - Online tests for jeopardy contestants are going on for the next 3 days. Neat people go represent!
the game is non-existent. you might as well play dice.
to the person who said monopoly is random: what...?
I agree with others that Battleship does require strategy. If you limited the amount of moves to successfully hit all battleships, you would quickly see people develope strategies. Since you are playing someone else, the moves are limited to how many the other player needs. A good battleship player can win over and over. That isn't random chance.
As mentioned in the comments of that article, boardgamegeek.com is a great source for discovering great new boardgames you've never heard of. The best ones to start with are Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne or Blokus. (In fact, Blokus can be found just about anywhere. Though it takes 2 minutes to learn, you have to be pretty sharp to win.)
Candyland is entirely random depending on the shuffle of the card deck. However if you cheat and arrange the deck then it is completely deterministic.
My kids quickly figured out that they could cheat by stacking the deck. Once they started doing this I encouraged them to carry it out all the way until they win. If you think about it is equivalent to program execution on a computer, albeit simplified.
It's kind of sad to grow up ;)
She would pick ones that didn't take her as far in exchange for another chance to take a jump ahead. She would also choose cards that would make the game last longer so someone sent back to the Ginger Bread Man would have time to catch up.