Wednesday, August 1, 2007

No. 0028 - Excel Battleship


8 to 5 schedule is a lot harder than what most would think. As for me and my work, we do 9-hour days and on certain days, that extra hour is like pulling hair. And today is no different, just like any other day as a hard day of work is about to wind down with less than one hour to go, both my cube-mate and my own momentum is just about to stop. Out of the blue, my cube-mate suggested to play battleship, then I said "we can use Excel!"

The setup is quite easy. Change the cell width to 2.5, draw two big borders as boundaries, add a few borders here and there as battleships and let the war begin! At first we would call out the coordinates out loud but that quickly drew some attentions from our cube neighbors as we were giggling like some 6 grader boys that just got off school. Luckily, our email service provides us with chat, so our battle immediately relocated to the cyber-space.

Patrick: 6G
Mike: miss, 27K
Patrick: hit, 3I
Mike: SUNK!, 20B

The great thing about Excel Battleship is that the size of the battlefield is endless. You can virtually make the grid as big or as small as you wish. In addition to a vast ocean, your NAVY can also be as big as you want. In fact, have multiple carriers, subs and destroyers. Heck, pepper the board with 40 PT boats, even though a PT boat fleet of this size would honestly drive me crazy. So go ahead, attach your xls file to a mass e-mail, get on chat and let's play Battleship!

P.S.- I'm challenging anyone to a giant game of Excel Battleship. One turn a day over e-mail and have a battlefield that will take up 365 spaces (actually a grid of 20X20) so the game will take one year.

4 comments:

Mark said...

Ok, dude. I'm in on the 365 day battleship game via excel. But if other people want in, are you just going to have 10 games going or what? Oh, it doesn't matter. None of them will last as long as me.

Patrick said...

You are on Mark! Yeah, I'll probably hold 2-3 games at the same time. I can do that in one xls file thank goodness to worksheet! I'll setup the board and e-mail it to you.

Patrick said...

Update on the year long Excel battleship between Mark and I. Mark has made four hits on four different vessels already while I'm still hitting nothing but the vast ocean. . . . . .

Elizabeth said...

Thanks Patrick, I started this at work. It's great!