[4] The first commercial version of the game was Salvo, published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company.

Strategy Games Co. produced a version called Wings which pictured planes flying over the Los Angeles Coliseum.

In 1977, Milton Bradley also released a computerized Electronic Battleship,[5] a pioneering microprocessor-based toy, capable of generating various sounds.

[9] It is played on a 7×7 grid,[10] and includes slight variations, such as four-player gameplay, and various ship sizes and shapes.

These alter the rules, including the size of the grid (8×12 in the NES version, 8×8 in the Game Boy version), size of ships (it is common to feature a submarine that takes up a single square) and special shot missiles for each ship.

For example, in the NES version, the cruiser has a five-shot missile which strikes five squares in an X pattern on the grid in one turn.

A version of Battleship based on the movie was released in which one side had alien ship playing pieces.

Employing a three-dimensional play area, battleships drop depth charges on submarines hidden on a multi-level board.

In one episode of the Amazon Prime Video show The Grand Tour, presenters Richard Hammond and James May played a game of Battleship with two cranes (colored red and green) and 20 REVAi vehicles as missiles.

In each round, each player takes a turn to announce a target square in the opponent's grid which is to be shot at.

The attacking player marks the hit or miss on their own "tracking" or "target" grid with a pencil marking in the paper version of the game, or the appropriate color peg in the pegboard version (red for "hit", white for "miss"), in order to build up a picture of the opponent's fleet.

[3] In other variants of this mechanic, the number of shots allowed to fire each turn may either be fixed at five for the whole game, be equal to the number of unsunken ships belonging to the player, or be equal to the size of the player's largest undamaged ship.

[13] One variant of Battleship allows players to decline to announce that a ship has been sunk, requiring their opponent to take further shots in order to confirm that an area is clear.