I think that both ideas were sound in theory, but don't really play out in a very fun or engaging manner.
For the Battleship style game, I feel like it's very easy to manipulate in the favor of people who know each other rather than players who go at it as lone players. I'm not going to accuse anyone of anything, but it felt a bit suspicious where while before the 2 other reply rule was taken away, the game was super active and competitive because there were a decent number of people playing it, and there was no way to coordinate through the chaos.
However, as time went on and random people stopped commenting, and the rule was changed to you only have to wait for one other person to post, the competitive spirit seemed to completely die/stagnate, and it felt like every time I posted and there was only one other person there, people chose to dip out and wait for people they were aligned with to get on and for me to leave the forum(I noticed people doing this, and had a feeling that players I'm referencing were in the same alliance somewhere-- so I checked, and low and behold, they were)
So that one was a great concept and had potential, but ended up being a bit disappointing to the point where it just wasn't fun to play it anymore due to what I consider unsavory tactics and unprovable potential collusion(other than the literal admittance of such in the comment right after mine)
As for the word search, that just seemed boring. I did the first one, but then I realized I was spending a lot of time for a relatively small chance at getting a few gold, and there was no interaction with other players/tangible competition. It would've probably been a bit more fun if the words were Grepolis related rather than just being random words.
On the poll I rated them "Somewhat satisfied" for these reasons. Concepts were definitely respectable, but how they panned out wasn't quite amazing from my point of view.
Still, they're definitely better than nothing, and it's cool that you guys are hosting these competitions presumably to inspire more forum activity.