Battleship Express is a quick dice-rolling filler that plays very well with children. I have played several games with my children, ages 6 & 5, and I can highly recommend the game for the following reasons:

Simple Rules:The object of the game is to sink your opponents' ships. The number of ships you need to sink is determined by the number of players, ranging from 5 in a two player game to 3 in a four player game. Each turn, you choose one of your ships to attack and you target an opponent's ship. Each ship tile has a special power and shows the number of dice it attacks with and the number of hits necessary to sink it. You then roll the dice, check the number of hits, and possibly re-roll misses, based on the attacking ship. If you score enough hits, the enemy ship is sunk and you add it to your dead pile. If not, the ship is fully repaired and your turn is over. It took only a couple of minutes to explain the game to my children and they had very few questions after the first game.

Scalable Rules: There are actually two games, The Captain's game and the more advanced Admiral Game. The only difference between the two is that the Admiral game adds special powers to each ship. I played the Captain's game with the children one time. After that, they wanted to play the Admiral game and had no problem with the rules. But the Captain's game is a nice variant for young gamers.

Game length: A game lasts only 5 to 10 minutes so it is easy to fit in a game before dinner or before bedtime. It is also easy to scale the game length to the attention span of your children, as you can play one game or several in a row in a relatively short period of time.

Downtime: Turns go extremely quick so there is virtually no downtime. Plus, everyone is cheering for or against the roller so the children remain engaged throughout the game.

Luck Factor: The game has a high enough luck factor that children have a reasonable chance of winning the game, even if the adults are trying their best. Therefore the adults don't feel like it is necessary to "take it easy" during the game, which makes it more enjoyable for everyone.

Battleship Express is a game that I can highly recommend for parents. The only warning I would give is that it is possible for a player to be eliminated during the game and some young children may get upset if knocked out of the game. The game plays so quickly though, that another game will start up in a minute of two, so hopefully that will mitigate any concern.

Thanks for the review. I picked this up on impulse to take on vacation with my kids in a couple weeks. I hope it scores as well with my kids as it did with yours.

Paul, I hope your kids enjoy it. Let us know how it goes.

I can't find links to the rules, so I'm curious -- is there any mechanism to prevent players from losing ships before their first turn?

-Dave

Dave, the way the game plays, there is no way to prevent a player from losing ships before their turn. When a ship is attacked, it is either sunk or takes no damage, so the first player by necessity has to be able to sink a ship.

Each player gets 5 ships, so in a worst case scenario the 4th player could be down to 2 ships when he gets his first turn. But that would be very uncommon as everyone would have to have a successful attack and all target the same person.