It's missing some really basic instructions, i.e. clicking cycles between "not marked", "marked as water" and "marked as ship". Just saying "Click squares to set where you think the ships are." is singularly unhelpful.
I found the process of discovery (including the ship orientation hints mentioned below) was part of what made it enjoyable. Of course, after about five minutes the rules and strategies have become apparent and it does become truly mindless...
Yeah, after a few minutes of playing and figuring it all out, it's become super easy to do a 15x15.
A timer would be really great to see just how well you can do and to push yourself for better times. I think I've gotten 15x15 to always under 25-30 seconds
This reminded me of Tents [0], which is one of the games in Simon's puzzle collection that I reach for while waiting for code to compile.
Someone should add this game! Simon has very good developer documentation [1], and the code is very cleanly written C. Seriously, every C developer should take a look at it, it is inspiring [2].
You have a grid where the rows and columns are labeled with how many squares there are (additional info: you get splits, like "3 2" means there is a run of 3, and 2). You have to work out the image.
This Solitaire Battleship is hard though, because of the sparse placement and has other elements to it.
There is a similarity to this and the reconstruction of an image from projection data. Horizontal and vertical histogram data has been used for OCR. (You can recognize a glyph from the histogram patterns.)
This is also related to the backprojection technique used in CT scans to reconstruct the slice images.
I've been able to solve all the ones I've gotten so far, but I'm stumped as to how to do this one (https://i.imgur.com/6qmZX7z.png) without
1. trial and error, or
2. using the checking tool to see what I did wrong (cheating in a sense)
I feel like there's a strategy that I'm missing here. I'm just not sure what my next step should be, which would probably help me get all the rest done.
Fun puzzle, but I had the same problem. Example:
https://imgur.com/a/t4T5l
The solution is valid, but the expected result has the two dots in a different position.
EDIT: I just realised, although it isn't clear in the instructions, that the shape of the boats is an implied part of the solution.
Not so, but only because of rules about the notation that are not stated. The dot in the top left (which I am assuming is one of the initial positions that the game gives you, from the darker background color) is, due to its shape, necessarily a size 1 ship. It does not continue downwards. Similarly, the initial position on the left-middle shows it going upwards. The initial positions not only tell you that there is a ship going through that location, but also in what direction, if it's the end of said ship.
Yeah, maybe you should put that closer to the top. It took me 5-10 minutes to realize that I hadn't scrolled down quite far enough to see that extra rule.
It's especially easy to miss if you're already familiar with the original 2-player version of Battleship, since there's no such rule in that game.
It appears to be European; you can switch to a Dutch and German version of the site.
Maybe this is European vs. American rules?
The German version of the Battleship page gives Rule 1 as "Die Schiffe dürfen nicht aneinander stoßen" which seems to mean that they cannot touch each other (not simply that they mustn't overlap).
The point of the no touch rule is that you can use your brain: from the hit information, you infer water areas where the enemy must not have ships.
Under the Milton-Bradley rules, the players can just clump their ships together into a small area; it's just more or less pure guessing. If you hit two squares side by side, you cannot infer that they are sections of the same hull; they could belong to two parallel hulls, or to two ships "parallel parked". It's dull to be able to infer next to nothing.
Yeah, that can be confusing - just updated the "show mistakes" code with a special-case "Ships can't touch diagonally" message when that happens, hopefully that'll help.
This puzzle is a bit janky and is able to have multiple solutions but only accepts one [1]. I recommend checking out similar-style puzzles called "nonograms" which are widely available.
