1931 — The original Battleship
Milton Bradley published it as a paper-and-pencil game; the plastic peg version arrived in 1967. Two coordinate grids, hidden ships, one shot per turn. Pure deduction with imperfect information — the same mental model a WW2 radar operator used a decade later.
1989 — Minesweeper
Microsoft bundled it with Windows 3.1 partly to teach users mouse control. The grid stayed, the hidden enemies stayed, and the deduction loop stayed — just with arithmetic instead of opponent guessing.
2007 — Picross / 2010s — Sudoku boom
Same DNA, different rules. The mobile era turned grid logic into a daily habit for hundreds of millions of players who'd never call themselves gamers.
2021 — Wordle and the daily ritual
Wordle stripped the grid down to one row of five cells but kept everything else: hidden answer, one guess per turn, deductive feedback. Its 300,000-to-2-million-players-overnight rise proved the format still has decades of life.
Where radar games fit
Replace the grid with a circular sweep and you get SignalLock: same hidden information, same one-guess-at-a-time pressure, with the added thrill of a target that might move while you decide.