Probably the several paragraphs of the article detailing conceptual links from Battleship to D&D:
> When Ken St. Andre struggled, in the introduction to Tunnels & Trolls (1975), to explain the secret maps of Dungeons & Dragons, he could only say, "The game is played something like Battleship. The individual players cannot see the board."
> Battleship was originally a pencil-and-paper game, which traded in the early twentieth century under names like Salvo (1931).
> Bob Mulligan had transposed Salvo into a broader naval campaign games of shipyards, factories, convoys, blockades, and fleet actions, and the basic idea behind it would inspire many such variants. We should understand Salvo as a foundational game in the development of hidden movement systems that tracked activity "off board,"
reply