In development · not yet on Google Play
Fall of Shot
You know this game. Two fleets, hidden from each other, and a grid of open water in between. We kept the part everyone already loves and fixed the part that always ruined it: nobody has to be in the same room, or awake, at the same time.
Your board on the left. Theirs on the right — and it stays that empty until something sinks.
How a game actually goes
Somebody starts a game and everyone else joins it — in person by holding a phone up to a code on the screen, or by being handed a short code to type. You each lay out your fleet where nobody can see it, agree on the rules, and begin.
Then you get on with your day. When it's your turn your phone tells you, you take your shots, and it becomes someone else's problem. A game can last an evening or a fortnight; it doesn't mind either way, and neither does the aunt in a different time zone who plays her turn at breakfast.
Every shot comes from a ship that is still afloat. Sink someone's gun and they've lost that gun — which is the difference between a game of luck and a game where you decide what to kill first.
And when there's nobody about, the computer will give you a game. Same rules, same fleets, no waiting — one CPU opponent or a whole squadron of them.
Is it safe for my child?
This is the question the game was built around, so here is the long answer rather than a badge.
In every game, for every player, there is nothing anyone can type. Not a chat message. Not a nickname. Not a team name. Not a caption, a title, a comment or a note.
Every name on that screen is one we wrote and shipped in the app — players, ships, weapons and fleets alike. A game whose names are not on our lists is refused, for everybody.
Players can send each other short phrases we wrote — "good game", "bigger board please". There are 26 of them and you can read every one. Nothing else can be sent by anybody.
This is not a child setting. There is no safe mode to switch on, nothing to detect and nothing that could fail to detect it. The protections above are simply how the game works, for everyone, all the time — which is a stronger promise than one that has to recognise your child first.
We took a while to get to that rule, and we got there by changing our minds. The first version simply kept children away from strangers. It sounded right and it protected the wrong thing — because at this game a stranger is just an opponent, and the risk was never who they were. It was whether they had any way to reach a child at all. So your child may play anyone in the world, and no human being anywhere can put a word in front of them.
We'd rather be plain about this being a choice, and about what it cost. Chat is the cheapest feature in games: people ask for it, it makes a lobby feel alive, and every competitor has one. We are not going to have it in any game with a child in it, ever. The reasoning fits in a sentence. A stranger who cannot write to your child cannot flatter your child, cannot ask which school they go to, cannot arrange to meet them, and cannot talk them into anything whatsoever — because there is no message, no filter to slip past, and no moderator to be asleep at the wrong hour.
Everything that usually makes online play unsafe for a nine-year-old runs through a text box. So we didn't put one in the boat.
What a parent controls
- You make the profile. A child's account is created by you, under yours, and plays on your licence. There is no way for a child to sign themselves up.
- Nobody picks a typed name — not even you. Every player's name comes from a list we wrote and shipped in the app. There is no name box anywhere in the game, so no name can be published by accident and nobody can be talked into putting anything else there.
- Nothing to unlock, and no birthday to wait for. We never ask for a date of birth. We have no idea whether a player is four or forty and we would rather keep it that way — a birthday we never collect is one that can never leak. And because the protections apply to everybody, there is nothing that ever comes off: no restricted state, no graduation, no setting for a parent to police. The protections never lift, for anyone.
- Nobody can look your child up. There's no search, no friends list, no leaderboard, no profile to find.
And one thing that protects everybody
The record of a match — the one holding both fleets — cannot be read by any player, including the two people playing it. Only our server can open it. That's what stops a doctored copy of the game from simply reading where your ships are, and it's enforced at the database rather than being a promise about our code. Your fleet reaches your opponent one shell at a time, the way it should.
The full detail of what we store and how to delete it is in the privacy policy and the account deletion page. Both are short, and both say the awkward parts out loud.
What's in it
- Two or ten players. There's no cap. Whether a six-player game is a good idea is between you and your family.
- Or play the computer. A full game against CPU opponents — one of them or several — with nobody to wait for. It's how you learn the ropes, and it's what a nine-year-old plays at seven in the morning when the rest of the house is asleep.
- Classic, exactly as you remember it. Five ships, one shot, hit or miss, no cleverness.
- Or not classic at all. Decide what a turn is worth — one shot, one per surviving ship, one at every living enemy, or a number the host picks. Change the size of the sea. Put together the fleet everyone sails, ship by ship, out of the yard.
- A 1945 mode, with ships that have names — Essex, Missouri, Cleveland, Gato, Fubuki. Armour that shrugs off the wrong gun. Anti-aircraft fire, flooding, a submarine that isn't where you think, and carriers whose air groups thin out as the game goes on.
- Sinking is public. When a ship finally goes, its shape and position are revealed to everyone at the table.
- Knocked out early? You still get to watch. Every board opens up to you and you see how it ends.
Where it is right now
The game is built, and it gets played most evenings by the family it was made for — which is a harder test than any schedule. What it isn't yet is on Google Play, and there's no date on this page because we don't have one worth printing.
Next is a small closed test with people we know. After that, the store.
It will keep changing after that, and we'd rather say so than pretend it arrives finished. Better sound. More ships. More ways to bend the rules. A yard where you can draw a hull that never existed and send it to sea. Those are additions to a game that already works, not the missing half of one.
For press
There is no press kit on this page yet because there is nothing in it worth downloading. If you're writing about small studios, family games, or what it looks like to build software for children without a moderation team, write to support@redmonlabs.com and you'll get a reply from the person who made it. Icons, key art and screenshots on request as soon as they're finished.