Sea Battle Minimal

Genre: Board Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Alternating, Online), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Sea Battle Minimal, released on Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a Board Game that… look, this is a take on Battleship. It’s about as clear a copycat as you can get. However, as I often say, there’s no issue with a copycat as long as it’s a good copycat, so the question then becomes whether this is a good copycat.

With a title that includes the word “minimal”, you won’t expect much when it comes to presentation, and you would be right to do so. This game’s 2D visuals are simple geometric shapes, backed by some ocean sounds and not much else. It works, I suppose, but there’s not much here to make things memorable or interesting.

But how is the gameplay? Well, this is a take on Battleship, and the basics it gets right. However, the details here come with some odd choices that will frustrate fans of the classic board game. Firstly, the “ships” you place are different from the classic board game – zero five-length ships, one four-length, two three-length, three two-length, and four one-length. Yeah, this game has four ships that are a single square big, so have fun seeking those out. All of this is placed on a 10×10 grid, and you’re not allowed to have any two ships adjacent or orthogonal to each other.

If you’re not okay with these radical changes to the core rules of Battleships… too bad, you’re not given the option to change them. Can’t change board size, can’t choose different ships, nothing like that. And while some players may find they like these odd alternative rules, for a game named to indicate this is a simple take on a classic game, I expect some players will be frustrated that there’s no way to play that classic game at all.

One other thing I should mention here is that this game does support online play, but it looks like the leaderboards show that only a few hundred players have played this game since its release four years ago, so… well, don’t expect to find any players to play against here. Also, the menu design is frustratingly confusing, and even trying to set up an online game forced me to retry multiple times as it booted me back out to the menu.

While I have a fair number of complaints about Sea Battle Minimal, I should note that this isn’t a bad game. The gameplay may differ greatly from the game it’s posing as, but that game isn’t necessarily bad, just misleading. Some players may enjoy this alternate take on the classic Board Game. Just be aware going in that you’re getting something that’s not only feature-poor, but with different rules than the game it’s designed to evoke.

tl;dr – Sea Battle Minimal is a Board Game where players place ships on a grid and then try to select squares in a grid to guess the positions of opponents’ ships. In other words, this is a take on Battleship, but one with very different rules regarding types of ship and placement, and these differences, as well as a lack of options, may frustrate players looking for what this game seems to be – a simple take on Battleship. While this isn’t an outright bad game, it’s not what it appears to be, and what it is turns out to be lacking in key areas.

Grade: C-

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