Life-Size BattleShip Game

As part of our Game Show VBS Last year, we had already built the Operation Skee-Ball Game.  Please click the link to see how we built it.  The following picture shows the Operation Skee-Ball  but you can also see the battle ship games on each side.  Unfortunately, I either didn't take (or couldn't find) the final pictures...



This is my design I did for the game.  When I did Connect Four  or Break My Heart Game or Plinko Game I planned everything out on graph paper.  Laying out where everything would go and how long to cut everything.  But when I did Operation Skee-Ball I just kinda "winged" this meant a lot of re-work.  With the Battleship game, I planned it all out to start with.  Helped me understand how big the wood needed to be and where to put the holes...



I measured out where my holes needed to go.  You can see from the first one, I cut the hole all the way through with the hole saw.  This caused quite a bit of tear-out.  From that point on, I went about 1/2 way through coming from one side, turned the board over and went the rest of the way through from the other side.

This gave a much nicer edge...



Here you can see two boards connected together with a piano hinge.   I had also painted the wood with primer...



Here is both the game panels.  One open and one folded.  You can see the piano hinge on this picture.



I ended up putting a back on the panels.  This was there mostly so that the pegs went in a set amount and no further.  The pegs on the real game are two-sized.  So they can only go so far.  We were using PVC pipe for our pegs.  They were 1 single size.  There had to be a way to stop them from going too far.



Another pic with the panel folded.  I had also painted it blue.  Yes, I have a lot of blue.  I believe this is the same blue as we used on the Connect Four



Once these were assembled, we realized they had quite a bit of weight.  We decided to add casters.  The casters were put on the opposite side of the hinge.  That way, they wouldn't be tempted to open.  But even with the casters, these were hard to move.  You pretty much had to balance them on the two casters.  Not sure I would do it like this if I had to do it again.  I'm not sure how I would make it mobile, but I would have to come up with something.



Here's the pic with some of the pegs installed...   Dang PVC being cut with my miter saw, got melted PVC all over my blade.  Still need a new blade.



Here's the best final pic I have.  You can see part of 1 panel on the left and part of 1 panel on the right.  My wife made the ships out of foam.  She cut them with a knife and we drilled out the holes to hold the pegs.    We also added pegs to the bottom of the ships to make them stay on the panel.  We painted the ships grey.  We painted some of the pegs Red.  These indicate hit.  We left some white.  These indicate miss...   We also added numbers and letters to make the location of the hit/miss.



The game was a lot of fun.  Of course playing sound effect over the sound system.  Like explosions, "you sank my battleship", and anything else you can find from a Battleship game.