My sisters and the magical disappearing battleships

I'm pretty sure my sisters cheated while playing against me in a game that is now immortal.

The 2025 class for the Toy Hall of Fame, the world's greatest hall of fame, was announced last month. (FYI, my Mount Rushmore of Halls of Fame also includes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame & Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.)

This year's Toy Hall of Fame inductees are Slime, Trivial Pursuit and the game referenced in the first paragraph: Battleship.

It's unlikely anyone will look back at the 2025 class as particularly memorable, unlike 2023 (Nerf, baseball cards, Cabbage Patch Kids and Fisher-Price corn popper) or 2000 (Mr. Potato Head, slinky, bicycle, jacks and jump rope), but it's a reasonable class. It's like the Baseball Hall of Fame 2012 class of Ron Santo and Barry Larkin. Both solid stars. Both deserving. But Santo and Larkin were the Slime and Trivial Pursuit of baseball.

I never played with Slime as a kid. However, I was forced to dress as cartoon character Jimmy Neutron in a room full of kids during a family trip to the Nickelodeon studios in Orlando, Florida, with our two young sons. The stunt was part of a knockoff of "Slime Time Live," a popular show on Nickelodeon, so I have a bit of a history with slime.

Trivial Pursuit, of course, was the leading table game for smart people in the 1980s, so not really for me. I loved the "Sports and Leisure" and "History" categories but had no chance at anything in the "Science and Nature" or "Art and Literature" categories. I had mixed feelings about that game, based on whether I was on a team with someone who knew Shakespeare's work or the periodic table of the elements.

But Battleship? It was one of about 15 board games at my childhood home.

The premise of Battleship, of course, is to figure out where your opponent's five ships are on a grid and sink them all, presumably killing all the sailors aboard (that part wasn't emphasized in the game's description, but is clearly the case and could be related to certain current events). You can't see your opponent's board, so you guess positions on a 10-by-10 board: "E5?" "D1?"

Once you get a hit, it's easier, since the ships (which take up two to five spaces on the board) must be positioned vertically or horizontally.

In my memory, while playing against my sisters, I'd get a hit (let's say D5). Then I'd guess D4, D6, E5 and C5. They would say I missed them all.

That was impossible! Those were the only directions their ships could go! Did they have disappearing ships? Did their ships go diagonally (which is illegal)?

I'd suspect my sisters cheated. I'd suspect they made a mistake when they told me D5 was a hit. Finally, I'd guess other spaces, intending to eventually return to the area in which I got a hit. Inevitably, I'd forget (maybe I'd win and forget. Maybe we'd get into a fight and I'd forget. Maybe they'd win and I'd be bored so I didn't care), but there's only one thing I remember from Battleship: My sisters didn't play it straight.

MY SISTERS CHEATED AT BATTLESHIP!

We're all older now and I doubt they'll acknowledge that they cheated on a board game in 1973, but I'm convinced it's true. And the fact that people (by "people," I mean my sisters) could so easily cheat at Battleship makes me skeptical that it belongs in the Toy Hall of Fame.

Alas, it's now enshrined. But now the nine toys that were nominated this year but fell short – most notably cornhole, the scooter and Spirograph– have to be wondering whether Battleship, like my sisters, cheated to win.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.