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Check out a full analysis of Fathom It!’s hard-level #7 puzzle. The analysis demonstrates a powerful solving rule commonly encountered when solving battleship puzzles.
The rule states that, in a rectanglar area of 6×2 or 7×2 with an effective tally count of five and one, there must be two vertical ship segments.

Just sit back and enjoy Mountain Vista Software’s new RSS feed. You will be notified whenever a new Battleship variant, article, puzzle solution, and more are added to the site.

Constraint programming is a programming paradigm in which a set of constraints
that a solution must meet are specified rather than set of steps to obtain such
a solution. It can be used for solving Battleship puzzles. I’ve added
links to
two interesting resources related to Constraint Programming and Solitaire
Battleship puzzles.

Added link to Merlijn Sevenster’s interesting article in the September 2004 issue of ICGA Journal entitled “Battleships as Decision Problem”.

After many years in the coming, GAMES Magazine has finally created a web site of their own.
For those who don’t know, GAMES Magazine
is a United States-based bimonthly magazine devoted to games and puzzles. The magazine is
published ten issues a year; monthly, except January and June. Each issue contains reviews,
articles, the Pencilwise section (pencil puzzles), and a contest. Hidden among the
advertisements is usually a fake ad, which readers must spot. The cover of the magazine
itself is usually a puzzle of some kind.

The Pencilwise section contains: Crossword puzzles, cryptic crosswords, word searches,
cryptograms, math and logic puzzles, as well as other regular and periodic puzzles, including
Solitaire Battleships.

Solitaire Battleship lovers should check out the Battleship solving guide
on the resources page.

It was through GAMES Magazine that I first learned of Solitaire Battleship puzzles.

Check out this month’s GAMES online contest. First
prize is a free one-year subscription to Games Magazine.

I added two Battleship variants that featured in the last year’s 13th World Puzzle Championship:

• Pentomino Camps (a variant of the Tents puzzle)


• Hexagonal Tetrominoes

Check out a full analysis of Fathom It!’s hard-level #9 puzzle. The analysis alternatively uses direct or indirect logic to place the largest ship, (i.e., the battleship).

Check out the growing list of battleship puzzles analyses.

Solitaire Battleship analyses often have a chess problem-like beauty to them.
Many people solve Battleship puzzles the way they eat salted peanuts: gobbling up puzzle after
puzzle, solving a puzzle as quickly as possible and moving
on to the next one without looking back.

This is a perfectly legitimate way to solve
puzzles in general, and Battleship puzzles in particular. I must confess, however, that I will
often solve the same puzzle again and again, trying to
eke out the cleanest and most elegant solution.

You can find some of these
analyses on MVS’s website. Reading through them may offer insights into solving
Battleship puzzles (I welcome any insights you may have!).

It was with pleasant surprise that I found that other websites had translated these
Battleship analyses into other languages (German
and Turkish).

The Russian puzzle site Diogen continues to invent new Battleship variants. Here’s a new one where numbered grid cells denote the distance
to the center a ship hidden within the grid.

I stumbled upon this fine puzzle site the other day: Markelo’s “Acertijos, juegos y pequeños enigmas”
(”Riddles, Games, and Small Puzzle”). Although the site is in Spanish, it holds within in a delightful
collection of Battleship puzzles, both classic puzzles and interesting variants (I used AltaVista’s BabelFish
translation service to translate any and all pages — very helpful!).

Markelo mentions on several occasions that the Battleshipp genre is his favorite type of
puzzle, something that is obvious when perusing his site. He publishes his own Battleship creations,
including classic puzzles, and variants like cylindrical,wraparound, minesweeper, easy-as, foggy, single-fleet subset,
two-ocean.
If you enjoy battleship puzzles, this is a site to follow (you can subscribe to his RSS feed).