Battleship 2025 FAQ and Rules

[battleshipmod]

Schedule

Tag claims: through June 25

Tag suggestions: June 21–25

Nominations: June 23–ongoing (please nominate before the game as much as possible; nominations will be checked once daily during the game)

Prompting: June 30–ongoing

Sign-ups: June 30–July 9 (or until the cap of 280 sign-ups is reached)

Team assignments: no later than July 11

Game begins: July 12

There is no set schedule for the game; it all depends on how quickly the teams surmount their challenges. We estimate it will last about three weeks.

After one team wins the game and another comes in second by accomplishing all their board 3 goals, there will be a 48-hour editing period, and then works will be revealed. Authors will remain anonymous for two weeks.

Links

Battleship Discord Server (not required to play, but strongly encouraged)

Freeform Tag Claims and Suggestions | Fandoms and Ships Tagset

Sign-Up Form (coming when sign-ups open)

Prompt Collection (AO3) | Prompt Collection (Automagic App)

Grape Collection | Lemon Collection | Pear Collection | Strawberry Collection | Main Collection

Mod contact email: battleshipexchange@gmail.com

Go to this page to view the rules with the expanding sections collapsed.

FAQ

What is Battleship? How does it work?

Four teams race to clear boards of targets. Each board is a grid on which targets of various sizes and shapes are secretly placed. Teams fire shots at the boards. When a shot is fired at a square on the grid, the mods declare it a hit or a miss. Once all the squares occupied by a target are hit, the target is eliminated.

The rules are loosely based on the Battleship board game, but for the Battleship Exchange, shots are fired by creating fanworks with particular tags. This year, each square is assigned a quantity (from 2 to many) and some tags (such as Sharing a Bed or First Time). There will also be goal quantities of AO3 ship types, ratings, and archive warnings (collectively metadata). Once a team collectively posts enough works to meet the goal quantity of a square's tags, the square is cleared; once all the necessary squares are cleared and the level's AO3 metadata goals have been met, the board is beaten.

After the first board level, there is a boss level. Like the boss at the end of a video game level, this boss has hit points. Each team must defeat the boss by creating more works. For the boss level, tags and metadata don't matter. Points are earned through wordcount or elaborateness of art. Another boss appears after the second board level.

This is a fanwork exchange, so works must be created to fit fandoms, ships, and tags in the exchange tagset, and to fulfill requests or prompts by exchange participants. There will be no official assignments. You aren't guaranteed a gift, but the mods will provide a giftless and treatless list to encourage gifting to all participants.

There are a number of additional rules that make the game more complicated and more fun, but the gist is this: Create both rapidly and strategically, collaborating with your team, to clear the boards, defeat the bosses, and win the Battleship Exchange!

What is the Battleship history and lore?

The Battleship Exchange was created in 2020 by Soulstoned and Red Ranger, inspired by a community challenge in the Trick or Treat exchange. This year's mod team consists of:

• gaialux, Team Grape captain
• lailah_tov, Team Strawberry captain
• Leaf/Tavina, Team Pear captain
• Soulstoned, Team Lemon captain
• Firebird and Eirvyan, Spreadsheet Wizards
• darkrosaleen, dogs are rad, DontStopHerNow, and keita52, Spreadsheet Gremlins
• flowersforgraves, Puzzling Pod Mod
• McBangle, Art Mod

The 2020 round of Battleship had a similar design to the board game, with the Yellow and Red teams directly competing to find ships on each other's 10x10 boards. They fought so ably that a separate board was created to battle a boss called the Ocean Witch. The Yellow Team won, but more peril loomed. One of the teams was taken off to space by an eldritch entity; the other was pulled into the ocean by a tentacle monster.

In 2021, teams Void and Abyss returned, once again looking for ships on each other's boards. The mods introduced new rules to include non-team players called mercenaries, who were bribed with in-game gold to create works supporting a particular team, and NPC pirates, who held the team captains for ransom. Just as Void closed in to defeat Abyss, the Ocean Witch banished the teams to dry land.

In 2022, the competition was between Forest and Frost, who went hunting for each other's strategic buildings. This time the game design was considerably more complicated, with a separate grid of shields that protected various board sectors. There were multiple types of weaponry and in-game currency, including gems stolen from two local dragons. Competition was fiercer than ever, and mercenary bribery escalated. In the end, Frost prevailed but offered a truce to Forest, hoping for an era of peace in which everyone could recover from the exhausting battle. But it was not to be. Tarina the Fairy, angry at the harm done to her beloved Ocean Witch and the theft of gems from her dragons, imprisoned the two teams in her castle: one in the tower, the other in the dungeon.

In 2023, teams Dungeon and Tower fought, but not against each other. Each team cleared three castle floors, Dungeon working upward while Tower worked downward. At last, they disarmed all the traps, found all the loot, escaped the castle, and took a much-needed break. But soon the adventurers grew tired of resting. At the Shoulder Dragon Cafe, they agreed to help two groups in need: spark-sprites, whose belongings have been buried by a roof collapse in the crystal caverns, and cave-trolls, whose treasures have been stolen by lava goblins and hidden in a volcano.

In 2024, teams Crystal, Mermaid, Tunnel, and Volcano embarked on exciting new dungeon crawls. Each team met with a community of fantastical creatures and was tasked with finding and returning their missing valuables. Along the way, they had several run-ins with goblins and their strange magical machinery. When the successful adventurers finally returned to the Shoulder Dragon Cafe, they found themselves inside of a cooking simulator game—a last trick played by the mischievous goblins.

In 2025, teams Grape, Lemon, Pear, and Strawberry will set up their own cafes. Aided by helpful Systems, they'll face new challenges: scarce ingredients, hungry customers, and demanding managers. Which team will meet its goal first? What secrets will they discover along the way? Play the game to find out!

How do I participate?

Everyone is welcome to participate in Battleship. There's no requirement to collaborate on strategy, create prolific amounts of fic or art or podfic, or be on a team at all.

In order to nominate fandoms and ships, post works, or post prompts, you must have a free AO3 account. If you don't have an account, join the account creation queue or contact the Battleship mods for an invitation code.

Some of the ways to participate:

• Join a team. You do this by signing up through the sign-up form. If you want to be on a team, you must sign up! Team assignments will be made shortly after sign-ups close, and are set in stone once the first boards are revealed.
• Post prompts. Having prompts to create for is very important! Over the course of the game, the four teams will post hundreds of works, and each one must fulfill a request or a prompt. Plus, the more you prompt, the more gifts you could get.
• Support creators. Edit podfic, brainstorm artwork, beta-read fic—anything that helps the team members and treasure hunters hit their goals.
• Hang out in Discord. If you're not playing, you won't have access to the team channels, but you can still enjoy the general chatter, explain freeforms, promote your favorite fandoms, and cheer from the sidelines.

Only team members will be able to post to team collections and contribute to team progress. Anyone can post treats to the main collection just for fun, but if you want to play the game, sign up!

If you want to collaborate on developing team strategy, you'll need to be in Discord, and you'll probably want to check in at least once a day so you can assist your team in hitting the most strategic targets. However, it's also fine to post works at your own pace and choose whatever tags you like. Your team will need to hit a total wordcount-equivalent number to defeat the bosses of round 1 and round 2, and all works posted during boss phases will count toward that goal, regardless of metadata or tags.

There is a cap of 280 sign-ups in order to keep the game manageable for our mighty but small mod team. We recommend signing up early.

What are the requirements for works?

Fic and podfic must be in English and at least 300 words long.

Art must be at least a clean sketch on unlined paper, or digital equivalent.

A work containing more than one medium (such as illustrated fic or podfics with cover art) will be scored using a combined metric for all media contained within the work: 1 tag for every 100 words of a fic or podfic, plus as many tags as may be reasonably considered visible within the art. Please note:

• You must explain in the author’s note which tags are being claimed for which media.
• Words in speech bubbles or captions of the art do not count toward either the art tags or the word count for the fic or podfic.
• Tags for a given medium will only count if they were included in that medium; tags that are only present in the fic may not be claimed for the art, and vice versa.

All works must be complete (no missing chapters or truncated scenes) and created specifically to fulfill requests in this year's Battleship prompt collection.

Each work must be created by a single creator. Each work must stand alone.

You must create your work yourself

You may not use generative (so-called "AI") text, art, or audio programs to create works for Battleship. You may not use any program that automates, imitates, or replaces human creativity. Works may not contain substantial material copied from canon or another source in the same medium. We regard these things as cheating, as well as contrary to the Battleship spirit of creative joy, and they are grounds for an immediate and permanent ban.

(Interpreting work from one medium to another is not copying or plagiarism. We enthusiastically welcome podfic of stories, stories about artwork, artwork inspired by podfic, and so on; these are transformative works, not duplications.)

Works may not contain substantial repeated material, such as paragraphs, comics panels, or clips that are copied with minor variations.

Medium-specific rules:

Fic: Brief quotes from canon and other written material are acceptable so long as they don't make up a significant portion of the work.

Art: Works may not be directly traced from other images.

Podfic: Sound effects, incidental music, and brief clips from canon and other audio material are acceptable so long as they don't make up a significant portion of the work.

We emphasize creating your work yourself because it's easy to get caught up in the competitive spirit and look for ways to cut corners. Battleship has the structure of a game, but that structure is there to inspire and invigorate us as creators, not because the game matters for its own sake. If you find yourself sacrificing creativity or fun for the sake of getting ahead, please take a step back and remember that the shared human experience of being inspired, making things, and giving gifts is what we're here for.

Quality

Please remember this is a gift exchange, and the ultimate goal is to make something that your recipient will enjoy. Make sure your work sufficiently fills the recipient's request or prompt without hitting any relevant DNWs. Interpret requested tags as the recipient requested them, unless you have the recipient's permission for creative tag interpretation. You should be reasonably familiar with the canon you're creating in.

After the game ends, there will be a 48-hour editing period. However, this is not a time for completing works. Every work should be complete and ready for the recipient to see it at the time it's posted.

Please don't leave placeholders in titles, summaries, or the work itself. If possible, ask someone to check your work for errors.

Anonymity

Works are as anonymous as you want them to be. It's fine to openly discuss and brainstorm a work with a potential recipient, or to say "I just finished a work that hits tags X, Y, and Z" in team chat. Sequels to your previous works are allowed, works in series are allowed, art may be watermarked, and podfic may include the podficcer's handle in the recording and on cover art.

Are there any other major rules?

You must be 18 or older to participate in this exchange.

Don't be an asshole. We know it when we see it. Treating Battleship participants or mods disrespectfully is grounds for a ban.

This exchange allows for a large variety of different themes and prompts, some of which may be sensitive for some participants, and tags of all types will be discussed in team channels. If there's content you don't wish to create, don't create it. If there's content you don't wish to receive, be unambiguous in your DNWs.

Any kind of cheating is grounds for a ban. (Excessive rules-lawyering, however, is traditional and always welcome.)

If you create for a requested tag, interpret that tag the way it's most commonly used, in line with how it was requested, unless the recipient opts in to puns and creative interpretations. If you include something in your work that's neither requested nor DNW'd, it's still best to interpret that tag the way it's most commonly used. For an in-depth explanation of this rule and its history, see Soulstoned's post on tag gremlining.

All Battleship works are technically treats, so anyone who prompts must enable treating in their AO3 settings. Do this by going to your Preferences, scrolling to the Collections, Challenges and Gifts section, and checking the box for "Allow anyone to gift me works."

Since there are no assignments, there's no defaulting and no pinch hitting. Participate as little or as much as you like.

I have so many more questions. Where do I find answers?

Join the Discord and ask there, or email the mods at battleshipexchange@gmail.com.

 

Nominations

Freeform tags

For this year's game, we need 576 freeform tags. That's a whole lot! You can help by suggesting tags for the mod team to choose from.

Follow the instructions in this post to contribute tag suggestions. If you won a guaranteed tag last year, that post also has instructions on how to claim it.

Requirements for a freeform tag:

• It is either a canonical OR 1 to 3 words long.
• It is a freeform tag (not a category or an archive warning).
• It is not fandom-specific.
• It does not refer to the format (e.g. "podfic" "works in English") or structure ("POV 2nd Person" "Readerfic") of the work.
• It is equally applicable to fic, podfic, and art.

Tag suggestions and claims will close on June 25.

Fandoms and ships

Nominate fandoms and ships at our AO3 tagset. Nominations will continue throughout the game, and will be approved at least once a day.

This year's mods have a "tagset anarchy" policy. If you nominate a fandom, we assume you want it to be in the tagset the way you nominated it.

Fandoms

All fandoms may be nominated, including All Media Types, Original Work (including subtypes such as Original F/F as their own fandoms), Creator's Choice of Fandom (which includes original work and any fandom at all, not just nominated fandoms), Any Fandom I've Requested Before, and Any Fandom I Agreed To on Discord. If a fandom has multiple formats, please make sure you nominate the particular format you want.

Nominate all crossovers under Crossover Fandom. The instructions on the nomination page say to do something different; ignore those instructions.

Ships, characters, groups, and worldbuilding

Tags may be a maximum of 150 characters long.

Use the format A & B to nominate ships that are non-romantic and non-sexual. Use the format A/B for ships that are romantic or sexual. If your ship doesn't fall clearly into either category, use your best judgment or nominate it in both & and / forms. Combined ships such as A/B & C are permitted, but be aware they may be interpreted differently by different people (are both A and B friends with C, or is only B friends with C?). Other ship formats, such as "Werewolf!A/Vampire!B" or "A xcons B", are not permitted.

Please put characters in alphabetical order by family name (like Lan Zhan/Wei Ying) or only name (like Jay-Z & Alicia Keys). You don't need to use the AO3 canonical form of a name or a ship. Feel free to omit piping, special characters, etc. if it makes your ship easier to read.

All solo characters and non-shipped groups may be nominated in the relationship field in the format 1: Character or 1: Group. Groups should be finite and clearly defined. The mods will not arbitrate disputes about who is or isn't in a group.

Significant objects and places can be nominated with the 1: prefix: 1: The Shire (The Hobbit), 1: Daniel da Silva's Nipple Ring (England Series - KJ Charles). This can be useful for art and worldbuilding prompts. 1: Worldbuilding may be nominated in any fandom.

You may nominate OCs, solo and in relationships, with or without specification (Original Character, Original Nonbinary Character, Original Elf Character, etc.); "Any" with or without specification (Any Character, Any Female Character, Any Villain, etc.); and "Reader" with or without specification (Character/Reader, Character/Non-Op Trans Male Reader, etc.).

Disambiguation

Please put the fandom name in parentheses after the ship or character. This is called disambiguating and helps us reassociate ships with their fandoms if they get separated. If the fandom has multiple formats, the disambiguation should reflect the format you want. For example, Dorothy Gale & The Scarecrow (Oz) is not a useful disambiguation because there are multiple Oz works featuring those characters. Dorothy Gale & The Scarecrow (Oz Books - Baum) is clearer and will help us put the ship where it goes.

Limitations

RPF: No non-famous family members of 20th/21st-century famous people. No living people under 18. No 20th/21st-century Nazis, fascists, or white supremacists.

Recursive fanwork: Nominations must have the original creator's approval in writing. Please provide approval evidence to the mods before nominating.

 

Sign-ups

Sign up through our sign-up form. (A link will be added when sign-ups open.) You must sign up in order to be on a team. You may sign up with a maximum of one AO3 account. You aren't guaranteed a gift, but don't worry—there will be plenty of gifts for everyone.

In the sign-up form, we'll ask you for:

• your AO3 and Discord usernames, so we can add you to the correct team channel in Discord
• your email address, so we can contact you if there's an issue with a work
• a link to at least one prompt posted by you, to verify your AO3 name; you must prompt in order to sign up
• an idea of how you think you might participate in the game, so we can balance teams
• team assignment requests

For the participation question, all we ask is your best guess. It's okay if your actual participation turns out to be very different from what you anticipated.

For team assignment requests, you may ask not to be on a team with a particular participant or captain. We'll honor all of these requests. You may also ask to be on a team with one (1) friend, and may ask to be on a particular captain's team. We'll do our best to honor these requests, but can't guarantee that you'll get what you ask for, as balancing teams takes priority.

The survey doesn't collect your Google login address, and you can fill it in while entirely logged out of Google.

 

Prompts

Prompt at the prompt collection. Prompts are very important and we need as many of them as possible! You don't have to sign up in order to prompt, and there's no minimum or maximum number of prompts you can add. Putting a request in the prompt collection doesn't sign you up for a team and doesn't guarantee you a gift. Prompting will remain open throughout the game. Multiple accounts may be used to leave prompts in the prompt collection.

You need a free AO3 account in order to sign up or prompt. If you don't have one, contact the mods for an invitation code.

View all the prompts with the AO3 Automagic App.

What to put in your prompts

You may make up to 50 prompts per account.

For each prompt, select 1 fandom, 1 to 20 ships, 1 to 3 formats (in the Character field), and 1 to 576 tagset freeforms (20 in the Additional Tags box plus an unlimited number in the Optional Tags box). Please only use freeforms from the Battleship 2025 tagset in your prompts.

Fandoms may be requested multiple times. For each prompt, you can indicate whether fic, art, and/or podfic is desired.

If you're requesting original work or original characters, please note that these will be created by the work's creator. To request work with original characters you created for your own original work, nominate your original work as a fandom.

Since nominations will be open throughout the game, you may want to periodically check the tagset for new nominations and adjust your requests.

Do not put in anonymous prompts, as the rules require that prompt fills also be gifted to the person who made the prompt.

DNWs

Your DNW list does not need to explain why you don't want something. Please don't use your DNWs to disparage something that someone else may be into.

DNWs that create an impossible request, such as "DNW incest" for an incest ship, and DNWs that are vague or difficult to understand, such as "DNW hard kinks," will be disregarded. DNWs that directly contradict a freeform (such as requesting an omorashi tag and then "DNW watersports") will be disregarded. However, DNWs may be used to specify how freeforms are applied to requested ships or characters ("DNW Bill Nye wetting his pants").

If you're requesting a solo character, you have the option to DNW romantic or sexual ships involving that character. By default, your creator may depict that character being in relationships.

If you're requesting Creator's Choice of Fandom (CCOF), Any Fandom I've Requested Before (AFIRB), Any Fandom I Agreed To on Discord, or a similar wildcard fandom, you may DNW up to three fandoms.

Optional details

Ideas, inspiration, and likes are encouraged but not required.

For each prompt, you may opt in to receiving sequels to your past gifts and remixes or sequels of your own work.

Linking a letter or a list of likes is encouraged but not required. Please complete and unlock letters by July 11.

If you request Any Fandom I've Requested Before, please link to a list of your past requests or your "everything search" results in the AO3 Automagic App.

 

Playing the game

Assignments

There are no official assignments or pinch hits.

Joining teams

After sign-ups close, team placements will be posted to Dreamwidth and Discord. We will do our best to create balanced teams based on what we know about the participants.

Using Dreamwidth

The Battleship Dreamwidth account is where boards and major game updates will be posted. To subscribe to posts there, create a free Dreamwidth account and then subscribe to see posts on your reading list or track posts to get notifications of them. Links to Dreamwidth posts will also be posted in Discord.

Using Discord

Being in Discord isn't required, but it is both helpful and fun.

General chat channels include:

• Rules and info links
• Game progress announcements
• Work check and shot call announcements
• General game discussion
• "I did this!": share your accomplishments, get emoji reacts
• Timed work sprints
• Fandom links
• Fandom promo threads
• Recs for works posted in any Battleship round
• Haiku
• Off-topic chat

There are two chat channels where you can get assistance from mods and players:

• Explain That Tag: If you're unfamiliar with a tag or want to make sure it means what you think it means, start a thread here and helpful people will give you context for it.
• Ask a Mod: Use this channel for non-urgent, non-private questions about things like rules clarifications and gameplay where other players can benefit from seeing the answer. Please don't answer questions in this channel if you're not on the mod team, even if you know the answer.

You can also use our friendly TicketBot to file a ticket that will ping an appropriate member of the mod team. Your tickets are only visible to you and the mods. These are the ticket channels:

• Works/Tags/Scoring Tickets: Ask about tag counting or scoring or something else related to a work you submitted. You can also file a ticket here if you want to make sure you're putting the right tagging or scoring info on your work before you submit it.
• Spreadsheet Help: Get assistance from a spreadsheet gremlin if your team sheet has a bug or needs a feature.
• Urgent Help: File a ticket about something that needs immediate mod attention, such as a spammer in the server or a conversation that requires intervention.

Each team has a set of locked channels for discussing strategy and mutual support. Please don't share information from those channels with people who aren't on that team. Team channels include:

• Announcements from the team's captain and strategists
• Questions asked and answered
• Strategy discussion
• General chat
• Slow creator discussion and support
• Fast creator discussion and support
• Calling shots

Please try to keep the questions and strategy channels free of general chit-chat. You can also DM your team captain if you have a question or concern that you don't want to put in the questions channel.

If discussion gets too boisterous, mods may employ slowdown to help it chill out a little. Everyone is encouraged to keep the conversation congenial. Please remember that team members are in different time zones and have different amounts of time and energy that they can devote to Battleship, and keep team spaces inclusive of all types of participation.

Posting works

Each team member is limited to posting 7 works per board on board 1 and 2. For each boss phase, the cap is 50,000 points, with no cap on the number of works. On board 3, the cap is 10 works; once one team completes board 3, the cap is lifted for all other teams.

Team members must post works to their team collections in order for those works to be counted toward a team's progress.

Treats created by people who aren't on teams may be posted to the main 2025 collection. They won't count toward team progress.

Each work must fill a prompt and be gifted to the prompter. Prompts may be filled multiple times, and there's no need to claim a prompt before filling it. Anyone can gift a work to anyone; you aren't limited to gifting works to people on your team.

A mod account, Ocean_Purl, will provide open-ended Any/Any, Any & Any, and 1: Any prompts for Creator's Choice of Fandom and Original Work. However, we ask that you try to fill a more specific request before resorting to using these. Works gifted to Ocean_Purl are greatly appreciated, but Ocean_Purl will not leave comments.

If you create for a Creator's Choice of Fandom, another wildcard fandom, or Original Work request, please mention in the author's note which request you're fulfilling.

Tags and author's note

Your work must be tagged with a fandom and ship/character from the prompt you're fulfilling. Make sure to select all relevant relationship types and archive warnings, as those will count toward your team's board goals.

The "Additional Tags" field on the work can include any tags you want, whether they're Battleship tags or not. Only freeform tags listed in the author's note will be counted.

Your author's note must include all the freeform tags you want to claim, copied exactly from the tagset in a comma-separated list (like "First Kiss, Fisting, Friendship"). It's best to use the checkboxes in your team sheet to generate a list. If a tag is misspelled, it may not be counted correctly. Please don't include relationship types or archive warnings in your author's note.

During boss phases, the author's note for art should have a list of included elements and the points you're claiming for them.

Scoring

Board phases

During board phases, each claimed tag on a work counts once toward the needed quantity of that tag's square on the current board. In addition, the AO3 metadata (ship type, rating, and archive warning(s)) on that work automatically count toward any label goals on the current board.

One tag may be claimed for every 100 words of a fic or podfic.

Art may claim as many tags as can be reasonably considered visible within the image. Tags that are only mentioned in speech bubbles or captions but not present in the image itself will not be counted. If a mod might reasonably need context or knowledge of the fandom to understand a tag (such as explaining why this art of Batman is tagged "orphan"), the artist should include a brief explanation in the author's note of how the tag is present in the image. If the mods cannot identify a claimed tag and no explanation for that tag is present in the author’s note, or cannot identify a tag despite an explanation, then only the tags that the mods could identify will be approved, and any tags not visible to the mods will be rejected. Participants with questions about tag claim decisions on their own artworks may submit a ticket in Discord.

You can tag the work however you want in AO3's tag field, but only tags listed in the author's note will count toward the Battleship board. You may remove the author's note after the game ends, or keep it for posterity.

Multimedia works

A gift containing more than one medium (such as illustrated fic or podfics with cover art) will be scored using a combined metric for all media contained within the gift: 1 tag for every 100 words of a fic or podfic, plus as many tags as may be reasonably considered visible within the art. Please note:

• You must explain in the author’s note which tags are being claimed for which media.
• Words in speech bubbles or captions of the art do not count toward either the art tags or the word count for the fic or podfic.
• Tags for a given medium will only count if they were included in that medium; tags that are only present in the fic may not be claimed for the art, and vice versa.
• All components of a single work must be created by the same creator.

Related works by multiple creators

When multiple creators collaborate to create related works for a single recipient, each work should be posted separately. Each work will be scored based on the content of that work. For example, if Work 1 contains a mermaid, a volcano, and role reversal while Work 2 contains a mermaid, a volcano, and feelings realization, then both works may claim the tags for “mermaid” and “volcano”, but only Work 1 may claim “role reversal” and only Work 2 may claim “feelings realization”.

Boss phases

During boss phases, works score points. All works scoring more than 10,000 points will count as 10,000 points.

Fic and podfic are worth 1 point per word.

Images are worth 500 to 2500 points. Images are scored as follows:

Art has a base value of 500 points for a single character, vehicle, or structure depicted in monochrome lineart with a blank or solid color background.

Additional points may be layered on for complexity:

• 500 points for the second character, vehicle, or structure depicted in monochrome lineart
• 250 points for each additional character, vehicle, or structure after the first two
• 250 points for each character, vehicle, or structure depicted in more than 1 color
• For art styles that do not use lineart (e.g., painting, pixel art), each character in full color will be scored as 750 points, equal to the point value of a character with lineart and color
• 250 flat points for shading
• 250 flat points for a detailed background

No individual image or panel may score more than 2500 points; any score greater than that will be capped at 2500 points. Unique, separately created images may be combined in a comic or compilation, for which each image will be individually scored (maxing out at 2500 points each) and the scores added.

Points for fic and podfic will go by the AO3 wordcount. For art, list the points earned in the author's note to make sure the mods score your artwork correctly.

Visual examples of art scoring will be shared before the game begins.

Co-created works

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to divide tags or points between multiple creators for a single work. While co-creating can be terrific, it is not a good fit for Battleship.

Team collaboration

Round 1 board phase

Your team will face a 12x12 board where each square is labeled with a numeric quantity and some tags. The tags jointly contribute to the quantity goal. Different squares contain different things. The goals for the board will be explained when the board is revealed.

In addition, there will be set goals for AO3 metadata such as "M/M" or "Major Character Death." These goals must be met for the board to be completed.

Example: A square is labeled "15, First Kiss, Hanahaki." The team posts 9 works that are tagged First Kiss but not tagged Hanahaki, 4 works that are tagged Hanahaki but not tagged First Kiss, and 1 work about hanahaki resolved with a first kiss (which counts twice). This clears the square, revealing its contents.

Round 1 boss phase

Once all needed squares on the board are cleared, the team chooses when to begin the boss phase. If all 144 squares are cleared, the boss phase begins automatically.

When the boss appears, some items found on the previous board will be applied to reducing the boss's hit points. Bosses are then defeated by posting works equivalent to their remaining hit points. Works posted during the board phase do not count toward the boss phase.

Example: If the round 1 boss has 100,000 hit points, and a team has found 35,000 points' worth of items, the team will need to post 65,000 points' worth of new works to defeat the boss.

Round 2 board phase and boss phase

You'll face another 12x12 board with goals to hit, but a different puzzle. Then you'll face the second boss and defeat it through posting works equivalent to its hit points.

Round 3 board (no boss)

After this board's goals are met, you win the game!

Strategy

During a boss phase, tags and metadata no longer matter. This is a great time to finish any works you left incomplete when their tags or metadata stopped being strategically useful.

Don't discard your unfinished works from the first two rounds—they may be useful in round three.

Works are technically anonymous. However, it's fine to openly collude on posting a prompt someone else wants to fill if that will help your team get a needed tag.

Non-team participation

You're welcome to make treats if you see a prompt you like. However, gameplay is only happening among the teams this year.

Game duration

Our goal is for each round to last about a week, but the real competition in Battleship is players vs. mods. No matter how much we try to design a game that will last long enough to be fun, the players always astonish us with the speed and volume of works produced. If the first round goes too quickly, we may make the second one harder. If it goes too slowly, we'll make the second one easier. We want there to be enough time for everyone who signed up to feel like they got to fully participate.

Ending the game

If your team is the first to beat the final board, you've won! The remaining teams will continue competing for second place.

Once two teams have beat their final boards, there will be a 48-hour editing period, and then works will be revealed. During the editing period, the other teams may continue to work toward beating their boards.

Team rankings and prizes

Each member of the winning team may claim a tag to put on next year's board. In addition, the team's theme will be featured in next year's lore.

Each member of the second-place team may claim a tag to put on next year's board.

The remaining two teams will tie for third place.

Tag claims may also be awarded for other accomplishments. Stay tuned.

 

After the game ends

Rest your hands, drink some water, get some sleep. Then enjoy all your gifts and be awed by how much everyone did in such a short time!

Please leave kudos and comments on your gifts, and be understanding if a gift is a little rough around the edges because it was made in haste. Remember that optional details are optional, and be open to getting something gloriously unexpected.

Authors will be revealed two weeks after works are revealed.