Movie bad. Game good.

The movie Battleship was horrible. It is a movie that should have never been green-lighted, but there is a lot of money in converting old toy and game IPs into Michael Bay-like movies and I don't think it will stop anytime soon. If you haven't seen Battleship yet, don't.

That being said, the movie edition of classic Battleship is actually really good. I don't think I need to explain what makes classic battleship so great, but the designers over at Hasbro have actually made it better. One of the main flaws with the game was how long it took. Each turn was one peg at a time, dotting the map, and things only got exciting when you found the route to destroying a ship. This game added a few extra mechanics to spice things up. Each player has a deck of spec-ops cards that make things interesting. You create a hand and play these cards. Most of the cards are simple like place 1 peg, place 2 pegs, and place 3 pegs. But there are others that do extra, like scan a row, reveal one un-hit coordinate, blitz a row or column, etc. Also there are Com Tower cards that add an extra sense of tension. Whenever you draw one, set it aside. The first player who collects all 4 Com Tower cards gets a special that auto-sinks a ship whenever he scores a hit. This new dynamic speeds the game up, but in a good way.

Now I will sheepishly admit that I did like the alien ship designs from the movie. And this game uses those to make some pretty cool looking battleship minis. You can play either the Aliens or the Navy, and the game case splits apart to create the 2 boards, making it very convenient for transport.

So the bottom line is if you already don't own a copy of classic Battlehip, pick up the movie edition, and try not to think of that abomination that actually made it to theaters while playing.

I scanned the reference card that shows what all the spec-op cards do.