Vous Descendus Mon Cuirassé!

From the world is flat files, I'm in one of those Starbucks-inside-Barnes&Noble places that make contemporary America so great and next to me two little French girls are using pen and paper to play a game that seems to be roughly battleship except I don't recognize the words they're using as indicating naval vessels. It occurs to me at this moment that I somehow never realized that this was a game you could easily play without actually buying the plastic board and little pieces.

UPDATE: I was trying to piece the correct French together, but apparently it should be "vous avez coulé mon cuirassé."

Comments

I'm at that just-out-of-college age where almost everyone you know is broke. One of my friends who lives in Atlanta (and uses a speaker as his only chair) once got so bored (and is so broke) that he called me and asked me to describe the Risk board so that he could make his own Risk game on scratch paper.

Posted by Freddie | January 2, 2007 12:26 PM

From the world is flat files,. . .

Fortunately, the world is now hierarchical files. Hope this helps in organzing your information. :-)

Posted by RSA | January 2, 2007 12:32 PM

two little French girls are using pen and paper to play a game that seems to be roughly battleship

You sunk my Rainbow Warrior!

Sorry.

Posted by Al | January 2, 2007 12:36 PM

of course you're not a baseball fan, but in The Long Season, Jim Brosnan's pathbreaking diary-of-a-season-as-written-by-a-ballplayer (only he really wrote it! it was the 1959 season), they kill time in the bullpen playing battleship the same way as the little french girls next to you are.

it was the first time i'd heard of the game when i read the book in the early '60s....

Posted by howard | January 2, 2007 12:37 PM

From the world is flat files,. . .

Fortunately, the world is now hierarchical files.

My world is still pendant files. I must be really out of touch.

Posted by brooksfoe | January 2, 2007 12:47 PM

Mastermind too, except some smartass always wants to allow longer and longer sequences.

Posted by aleks | January 2, 2007 12:49 PM

It occurs to me at this moment that I somehow never realized that this was a game you could easily play without actually buying the plastic board and little pieces.

Kind of surprising, considering you figured out how to play Mortal Kombat without buying the video game.

Posted by SoCalJustice | January 2, 2007 12:50 PM

Couler. Vous avez coule mon cuirasse. Or maybe, vous m'avez coule le cuirasse (if I'm on the ship). Descendre would be more like, you gave my battleship a put-down.

Posted by schwa | January 2, 2007 12:59 PM

Yeah, like Schwa says, I guess. Did the French girls really say "Vous descendus"? Of course maybe it's idiom.

Posted by Kyle | January 2, 2007 1:15 PM

credit where it's due--
that's the first time any of the Al-bots has gotten a laugh out of me.

and thanks, schwa--that title didn't sound right to me.
on the other hand, i don't see why MY's spelling should be better in french than in english.

doesn't this just show that old europe is hopelessly backward in its technology?

Posted by kid bitzer | January 2, 2007 1:17 PM

"descendus" sounds like a Harry Potter spell.

Posted by cleek | January 2, 2007 1:42 PM

As a Frenchman, I can attest to the grand tradition (of which I am a proud link) of French schoolchildren stealthily playing battleship ("la bataille navale") during class, and my grandparents were already doing it before some corporation decided to sell a useless plastic version of a game whose appeal lies is in its effortless simplicity.

Posted by PEG | January 2, 2007 2:03 PM

Man, how else would I have gotten through high school calculus??

Connect four works well too because you're not tempted to shout things out during the game, although it is tempting to violate the implied gravity when no one else is looking...

Posted by MikeY | January 2, 2007 2:27 PM

SS l'Idiot Americain et le SS Laid Americain

Posted by Linus | January 2, 2007 2:39 PM

"I somehow never realized that this was a game you could easily play without actually buying the plastic board and little pieces."

We played paper battleship in high school in the sixties. And table football with matchbooks. You can kick some awesome field goals with a matchbook.

Plus ca change, etc.

Posted by zippy | January 2, 2007 2:42 PM

"Battleship," as pen and paper game, was in every copy of Hoyle I ever owned. In the back with the non-card parlor games.

Posted by Jim Henley | January 2, 2007 2:53 PM

The words in French: touché for hit, and coulé for sunk.

Posted by cedichou | January 2, 2007 3:42 PM

Also it should be informal since we're talking about kids playing games together. "Tu as coule mon cuirassier!"

Posted by Kyle | January 2, 2007 4:06 PM

Huh, I was just thinking about all the pencil and paper games I used to play. Such as Dots, now available as a flash game: http://www.addictinggames.com/dots.html

Posted by miguel | January 2, 2007 4:07 PM

Most likely, you hear "Mais euhhhh ! T'as descendu mon cuirassé !"

Which would translate to "Hey craaaaap ! You shot down my battleship !"

"Descendre" is mostly used for planes and people, but it also works for paper fleets maneuvered by ten years old admirals.

Posted by Fifi | January 2, 2007 9:13 PM

Back in school, we used to play Bulls and Cleots. (zilch--no letter/number guessed is in the hidden word/number; cleot--letter/number is in the word/number, but not correctly placed; bull--letter/number is in its correct position in the hidden word/number. If the word was body and jobs was guessed, you would respond 1 bull, 1 cleot, 2 zilches.)

I suppose it's still played, although probably not with the same terminology. The uses we made of pen and paper might surprise you. But in those days the most technologically advanced student used an electtric typewriter, the rest of us used manual ones or even wrote it out in longhand.

Someone once gifted me with a plastic version using colored pegs called "Master Mind".

Posted by kishnevi | January 2, 2007 11:58 PM

Someone once gifted me with a plastic version using colored pegs called "Master Mind".

I used to play that!

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | January 3, 2007 1:19 AM

I was online, trying to find the correct spelling for Cleots in "Bulls & Cleots" and found you entry. Do you know if that's the right spelling? It seems unlikely, given that Google only lists that 16 times.

Posted by Rebecca Bryant | January 31, 2007 4:07 PM