Battleship Exchange

Community tag suggestions

Each round of Battleship has a set list of freeform tags that must be used to win the game. To help build this list, we need your help! If you won a tag claim last year, please use it now. If not, or if you want to suggest more tags in addition to the ones you're claiming, please do that too. Both tag claims and tag suggestions close June 25.

Tags won last round

Tag choices were won in one of five ways last round:

• Member of Team Tunnel
• Member of Team Crystal
• Member of Team Volcano/Mermaid AND posted 2+ treats during anon period
• Posted 2+ works for giftless/treatless people
• Correct guess in Battleship 2024 Board 2 logic puzzle

Tags that were won are guaranteed to appear in the game, as long as they follow the guidelines below.

If you aren't sure whether you won a tag, please file a ticket on Discord.

Tag requirements

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.

Try to avoid tags that would require longer fic to fill (e.g. casefic).

"Canonical" means that AO3 has marked the tag as commonly used. To check whether a tag is canonical, go to https://archiveofourown.org/tags/search, enter the tag in Tag Name, and select "Freeform" under Type and "Canonical" under Wrangling Status. If this search doesn't bring up that exact tag, it's not canonical. Please check all tags of 4 words or more before putting them in the spreadsheet.

All freeform tags must meet these requirements, whether they're won tags or community-suggested tags.

How to suggest or claim a tag

Please put community-suggested tags in the 2025 tag suggestion spreadsheet. You can add as many tags as you like. These tags are not guaranteed to get into the final tagset, and we may add tags that aren't in this list, but we're likely to take a lot of tags from this list as we build the boards.

Please claim won tags on the won tag choices spreadsheet. Enter your AO3 name, tag choice, and tag claim reason. If you have multiple claims, put in one tag per line. Tags without a corresponding name will not count, so make sure to enter your name on the same line as the tag. If your AO3 name has changed since last year, please let us know!

Thanks to everyone who gave us over 1300 tag suggestions! We've whittled them down to a draft list of 388 (plus 12 AO3 labels for a total of 400). It's in the "2024 Draft List" tab of the freeform suggestion spreadsheet.

Before we finalize this list, we'd like to get your feedback. In the comments on this post or in email to battleshipexchange@gmail.com, please let us know:

• If you spot two or more tags that you feel are redundant or significantly overlapping.
• If you spot tags that are confusing or ambiguous (not in the fun rules-lawyering way).
• If you feel the overall vibe of the list is too heavily skewed toward a certain kind of work, to the point where you personally wouldn't be able to contribute as much as you want to.

Keep in mind that goal numbers will vary from tag to tag, and each square will have two associated tags or labels. We'll do our best to balance these in a way that encourages writing more specific or challenging tags while still making it reasonably possible to clear any square.

EDIT: Thank you for your feedback! We have a list of issues to consider and are no longer taking comments at this time. Disabling comments will hide existing comments, but they're still there, just only visible to mods. We appreciate everyone who took the time to chime in.