Braille Based Battleship in Fusion

Battleship is definitely not exactly a blind user friendly game, relying on colors and has no braille. The conceptual design will be outlined in this document and should hopefully result in a successful construction of your own braille game. I have included all my project files if you just want to print the game and move on, however if you want to make your own then this guide is for you. Here's a link to the rules. While this guide is based on you using fusion you may recreate this using the guidance provided in other software. Note this game is very inefficient resource wise.

When designing your own battleship game, first you need to create the board layout, how many ship pieces (whether they be individual bricks or singular pieces) with each hole. For each hole on a ship you need a hit piece. Likewise for each empty space on your board you need a miss piece.

Miss piece req = ((width * height) - ship holes) * 2.

Hit piece req = ship holes * 2

For the amount of ships I'd recommend free handing it with a good assumption of what would be a good amount based on the ruleset you write. Generally an approximate 1/6 ratio with your miss pieces is recommended.

For the board the construction is entirely up to you but requires the letters and numbers to be replaced with braille, for simpler understanding braille wise I'd recommend doing a double letter configuration, like AA being the top left and II being the bottom right. You need 1 board for your ships and 1 board for keeping track of the enemies board. (2 people need 4 boards).

Tray for the pieces should be scaled around the size of the pieces and how many pieces you want to fit.

The board is the body of the game. In general you want it to be navigable by 2 hands and keeping complexity to a minimum to make it easier for those that are sight impaired to remember hit and miss locations. Layout should be able to fit 2 boards in front of the user without struggling to reach.

Preferred layout would be one board on the left for ships and one board on the right with a tray between them for the pieces.

You really only need holes in the board squares, I'd recommend making them one millimeter shorter than the entire boards height to avoid things potentially falling through them. The board should be no higher than 10mm. Recommended method for creating holes if you're using fusion is to make lines to sketch out the board and then having a better time sketching in a circle between the lines. Selecting all the circles and using the extrude tool to make an indentation into the board. On the parts with braille try to space it out so you have room for 3 dots for ideal braille dimensions.

Rounding the board is recommended to minimize injury, do not round the holes or braille however.

The size of the ship in width and height should be able to perfectly fit on one square of the board and the peg at the bottom should be slightly smaller in diameter so it can easily fit in and out of the hole, this rule will apply to the following pieces with pegs.

The ship should have holes at the top with the same size as the holes on the board. If you want to make one piece like my custom example of battleship, you want it to only fit in one square of the board.

If you want to make multiple pieces you should scale it based on dimensions. A 3 hole wide piece for example would be in a (width * 3) * height configuration.

If you want to make not line shapes you can still apply this logic but using math for it is a lot more complicated and I don't recommend it.

The ship should have a unique shape compared to the hit and miss marker and be significantly larger. Storing the ship should be as simple as putting it on the board.

The miss marker should be very simple in design and feel, a similar peg to the ships and a top that makes it simply to know you're grabbing a miss marker. There's really not much to making one beyond this. I personally just extruded a circle upward and filleted the top.

The hit marker should have similar dimensions to the miss marker but have some tactile difference all across it to make it obvious it is a hit marker.

Tray should be scaled to how many pieces you'll need and their size, a divided may be used if you want to make it easier to find miss and hit pieces. Rounding it is recommended to minimize injury.

If you desire to create your own rules you should know what you have and what you want to make in the process of creating this. Then once you have that down making the rules should be fairly simple, my example provided a good basis. You want to absolutely assume the user has no idea how to play battleship and explain rules in detail, giving help on how to play well is also recommended. Make sure to write down how many pieces are required per player so they don't have to think as hard when printing.