Place your fleet, then hunt the hidden enemy grid, one shot at a time in a battle of deduction.
Lay out your fleet of ships on your grid, then take turns firing single shots at the opponent's hidden grid. Each shot is a hit or a miss; sink a ship by hitting every cell it occupies. Use hits and misses to deduce where the remaining ships lie. Sink the entire enemy fleet before yours goes down.
Salvo is the original commercial name of the game most people now know under a later trademark. It was published in the United States in 1931 by the Starex company, and it was the first edition sold in a box rather than improvised on paper.
The game itself is older than any edition. Parallels are drawn to E. I. Horsman's Basilinda of 1890, and it is said to have been played by Russian officers before the First World War — the diary of the poet Ryurik Ivnev mentions it in 1907.
A crowd of rival editions followed through the 1930s and 1940s: Combat: The Battleship Game, Broadsides, Warfare Naval Combat, and a version called Wings that replaced ships with aeroplanes over the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of them, Salvo included, were sold as pads of pre-printed paper.
Further reading: Inside Salvo
Salvo is an original naval guessing game of hidden fleets and deduction, with sharp computer opponents and online matches. Free to play in your browser, made in-house at PlayPendium.
Beneath the simple act of clicking cells lies a deterministic engine that models hidden fleets, probability-weighted reasoning, and the classic duel of concealment and discovery.3