Rear Admiral Nylon is having problems with his battleship

December 22, 2005 10:52 AM

Tandy Electronic Sea Battle (retro Battleship rip-off): I just bought one for a quid, but there was no manual in the box. How do I make it work? Pictures inside.

I understand the concept of Battleship, but without the manual I'm struggling to know what buttons to press to actually make it go. It's a Christmas present for my sister, and although I'm sure we'd have fun just saying things out loud, like "J3!" - "Miss!", it'd be good to actually capitalise on the built in electronic features. There's a photo of it here, and a close up here. Pressing any of the START, MODE or VERIFY buttons just makes a weird shape appear on the LCD screen, and it beeps.

posted by nylon to sports, hobbies, & recreation (4 comments total)

Back in the day, I played either this rip-off, or the real electronic battleship. The greatest disappointment was that you couldn't just place ships where you wanted to place them, you had to select one of the pre-defined ship configurations from the booklet, and then enter the code into the toy. After both players did this, you would push the buttons to call in your shots, and get either a hit or miss sound out of the speaker.

So you may want to look for a copy of the original manual. Alternately, if you can figure out how to get a code into the thing, you could sequentially hit every square to determine where the ships are placed. It would be a lot of work to map out the whole thing, but you would get mad geek points for doing so.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:05 AM on December 22, 2005

This guy has a picture of the manual on his web site, perhaps if you contacted him you could arrange for him to scan it or at least explain how to play it.

There seems to be more than one game from Tandy called Sea Battle. here is one, and another.
posted by bondcliff at 11:14 AM on December 22, 2005

I think this is an alternate name or release of Electronic Battleship - so does boardgamegeek. I suspect the controls are the same for both. The boardgamegeek website will show you who among their members own this game. If you join that site, you can probably then view the contact info from the folks who own it, and beg someone to scan the manual for you.
posted by chr1sb0y at 11:22 AM on December 22, 2005

Here are instructions for the Hasbro version.
posted by bondcliff at 11:26 AM on December 22, 2005