Yubotu (aka Battleship)

One of my favorite games when I was younger (hmmm, maybe a candidate for my contribution to the Childhood Games Series the Monkey Mama’s are doing in West Michigan) was Battleship. Remember the colored little boards that opened and closed like little laptop computers — although at the time we had no idea what a laptop was or what one would look like? Each player positioned their fleet of little plastic destroyers, cruisers and submarines onto their grid and then proceeded to try and sink the opponent’s ships by guessing the correct coordinates. My brother was good, very good, and he beat me more than the other way around — which is probably why I kept playing… the challenge of trying to beat him.

So, this isn’t exactly letterboxing related, but it kind of is since I came upon the site a few months ago while doing research for a letterbox I was creating… I think my search terms were ship and logic and maybe game or puzzle. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I ended up there, just that Google took me to the DKM Software site, which has several online games you can play for free. They have a great online version of Sudoku, but the most exciting offering is a game called Yubotu, which is basically a computerized version of the old Battleship game in which you use logic to try and deduce the location of the ships the computer has randomly placed in the grid.

As if I didn’t already have enough online diversions, what with Flickr and Etsy and last.fm and all of the websites and blogs I read and my recent addiction to Facebook Scrabulous (shout out to Stargirl here) and assorted other time-sapping amusements, now I am addicted to Yubotu. There are 6 new puzzles each day, ranging from Beginner to Advanced, none of which are really all that difficult, but are fun all the same.

At the moment, I have no idea how I could ever work this into a letterbox clue, but believe me, I am working on the possibilities.