Customer Reviews

Yubotu: Sink the Fleet in These Addictive Battleship Puzzles (Conceptis Puzzles)

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It seems natural when reviewing grid-based pencil-and-paper puzzle game to compare it to Sudoku. I think Yubotu compares quite favorably. It has much the same deductive reasoning, challenge, and addictive qualities that I believe have made Sudoku popular, but with a minimum of tedium.

The rules are quite simple. There are some basic parameters about where ships may be placed in relation to each other and the number and size of the ships which must be found. You are given numbers for each axis of the "ocean" grid which indicate how many squares are occupied by part of a ship. Your job is to use these rules to draw them all in.

The book begins with an Introduction, which is a nice summary of the rules and outlines the advanced strategies needed later. It has 180 puzzles, two-per-page and divided into sections of increasing difficulty: Seaman, Petty Officer, Ensign, Captain, Commodore, and Admiral. At the end is an answers section with answers to all of the puzzles.

I've stuck a pencil in my current place, put a rubber band around the whole thing, and taken it with me whenever I needed something to occupy my time. True to the text on the title, I find solving the puzzles to be addictive. Definitely recommended!

This book is like playing "solitaire Battleship". You need to find where the ships go, using clues given by the few spaces already filled in and the numbers along horizontal and vertical edges.

I found it as easy to learn as Sudoku and Kakuro, but much easier than Paint-doku.

Very nice progression in difficulty levels. The basic solving techniques work well for the first few levels, but nearer the end of the book I worked a lot of trail-and-error process of elimination.

Decent paper quality, as I did need to erase some grids and found that the paper held up just fine.

Tips: if you are going to fill in the whole square, use a dull pencil, not a sharp one or a mechanical pencil. Do not shade them in with a heavy hand in case you want to erase.

You can use simple markings instead of shading entire squares. For example, I use dots instead of filling in whole squares. And a single wavy line for water instead of 4 lines as shown in print.

These puzzles are super fun!