Battleships Logic Puzzle
14 comments
·October 25, 2024akleemans
Bimaru is a fun puzzle. I remember putting an Android App in the store containing the phrase "Battleships", only to receive a copyright claim from Hasbro, and Google immediately took the App down from the Store.
I rewrote it as a web version, should be still available: https://www.kleemans.ch/static/bimaru-web/
pavel_lishin
Ooh, this is a fun variant of nonograms! If you like this puzzle, I think you'd enjoy those too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram
uses
I've spent quite a few hours on this thing when I've needed something non-linguistic for my brain to engage in. If it was World of Warcraft, I'd probably be a level 30 rogue.
t00ny
Nice puzzle, reminds me of Zachtronics' Dungeons & Diagrams.
gnramires
An undo button would be nice :) (for when I need to backtrack)
QuadrupleA
If you turn on hardmode there's a "Save Checkpoint" button. But not easy mode at the moment (I wanted to keep the UI clean).
lupire
"Ships can't touch diagonally."
But it lets you do it and then tells you it's wrong at the end.
When the "4" has a strikethrough, the strike is almost impossible to see.
justinpombrio
This is one of the puzzles at BrainBashers:
eapriv
There’s a bug: if a puzzle has multiple solutions, only one of them is considered “correct”.
QuadrupleA
Author here - check that the revealed ships in your puzzle are keeping their particular shape. E.g. a revealed-at-start "D" shape ship-end can't be the middle of a ship, or an "O" submarine, or face a different way that it's initially facing. 99.9% of the time people report this, it's a confusion about that aspect (if you can think of a way I can make it clearer definitely let me know!).
hibikir
The simplest way would be to also pre-fill forced empty spaces. It 'solves' part of the puzzle for the player, but hopefully that wasn't a key part of the fun. You go as far as to explain all of those bits at the bottom anyway.
This kind of thing is done to great effect in "Good Sudoku", which gives players a lot of automated tools for the simplest things, as to lead players to handling the more fun, more complicated parts of the hard puzzles.
QuadrupleA
That would be a cool direction to explore.
tcmb
What this needs is a daily puzzle and an easy way to share it in text format, a la Worlde or Domino Fit...
Thank you for making it mobile-friendly. I almost made my own Android version of this just because the usual site I played it on wasn't usable and the best I could find in the Play store was mostly there to sell you $1.99 packs of 50 puzzles as if there was any actual effort put into generating them (seriously, they acted like 1 free puzzle per week was generosity).
Although can we get a setting to switch left and right click's default actions? I prefer puzzle games like this to use "click where there is something, right click to mark where there isn't something".