Board game analysis: Stratego

This is a review of the board game Stratego, the classic boardgame of battlefield strategy. I will look into the game’s best and worst sides and I will take a look at the game’s core mechanics and I will try to interpret the game’s target audience. I will also choose one of the game systems that I found to be the game’s most interesting.

Stratego is a bit like chess except you don’t know which pieces are which on the other side. Each player has 40 pieces that represent soldiers, with ranks from Scout to Marshall (1 – 10). The object is to capture the opponent’s flag or make them surrender. In the event of no movable pieces for a player, the opponent is the winner, though part of the challenge is actually figuring out where the flag is.

Amongst the ranks of soldiers, there are four specialty units. The Scout is one of the weakest players in the game, but can move over many squares, as long as the movement is in a straight line. And the squares he moves over are vacant. Most players send Scouts out to battle early in the game to find out the ranks of the opponent due to their movement capabilities. The bomb is an immobile object that, once the game starts, must stay in position. If attacked by anyone, except the miner, the attacking piece is automatically defeated. The Miner is also a weak piece (just edging out the Scout) but his strength lies in the fact that he is the only troop on the battlefield that can attack bombs, thus disarming them. The last, and sneakiest, of the units is the Spy. The Spy is the weakest piece out of all, but he is the only piece in the game that can kill the top ranked unit, the Marshall. The trick is that for the Spy to kill the Marshall, the Spy as to initiate the attack. If the Spy is attacked at any time, including from the Marshall, he automatically is removed from the game.

Typically, one player uses red pieces, and the other uses blue pieces. Pieces are colored on both sides, so players can easily distinguish between their own and their opponent’s. Ranks are printed on one side only and placed so that players cannot identify specific opponent’s pieces. Each player moves one piece per turn. If a piece is moved onto a square occupied by an opposing piece, their identities are revealed; the weaker piece is removed from the board. If the weaker piece was the attacker that piece is removed from the board; if the attacker is the stronger piece, it will remove the weaker piece and occupy its square. If the engaging pieces are of equal rank, both are removed. Pieces may not move onto a square already occupied unless it attacks. Two zones in the middle of the board, each 2×2, cannot be entered by either player’s pieces at any time. They are shown as lakes on the battlefield and serve as choke points to make frontal assaults less direct.

Best sides:

Stratego is easy to pick up and play, it has a very short play time which I personally appreciate. The game features a simple set of rules but there are many things that you can abide by in order to be a better player, for example bluffing. Bluffing can be a great help when playing Stratego, for my first match I didn’t quite know where to place my different pieces and my setup was rather close to random. On my other playthrough however, I started to realize that I could trick my opponent into believing things that weren’t true, the location of my flag for example.
I choose a random low level character as my fake flag and all I needed to do was keep it stationary, since you are not allowed to move the flag, thus fooling my opponent into thinking that it was my flag. In reality I had kept my flag in the same location I used for our previous match. And that is just one of the things that make me like this game so much.

Worst sides:

I do not have much to say on this part, there isn’t much that struck me as bad and less that actually was worth mentioning. I will say however, that if I have to mention something bad it would be the fact that there are many, maybe too many pieces to set up which takes time.
I also wonder if all the pieces are necessary to play. At the end of all our games of Stratego we’ve played, both me and my opponent have had several low level characters left,  that we never even moved, this leads me to believe that maybe these aren’t as useful as the game make them out to be. And therefore I would like to try and cut down on the numbers of some of the low level characters and see what that does to the gameplay.

Core mechanics:

I would say that this games core mechanics are moving, attacking and planning.
Every troop piece, with the exception of the Scout, can only move one square at a time. During a player’s turn they can either move a piece or attack.
Attacking is as easy as getting adjacent to an opposing troop and placing your piece over theirs. The players declare what rank each piece is, and the higher rank wins and the losing piece is removed from the game. Stratego also involves a lot of strategy. I will list the most basic ones that I used when playing here. One of the most commons strategies in Stratego is the actual placing of your pieces. You want to place your pieces so that your flag is well protected, but you want to place them in a fashion that leads your opponent to believe it’s someplace else. You also want to place your stronger pieces so that they are available for attack (don’t place behind a cluster of bombs or all the way in the back).
Another important strategy is to try and analyze the way your opponent is moving his or her pieces, in order to find out their rank. For example if your one of your opponents pieces has remained stationary for most of the game you can assume that it’s either a bomb or his or her flag. Then there is the placement of your special pieces. Take the spy for example, you need to consider its placement carefully, place it to far forward and it’s more likely to be captured early on. Placing it too far back may make it inaccessible when your opponents Marshal’s identity is revealed. All these things are off course up to you as a player.

Most interesting system:

I would say that the trickery and bluffing is the most interesting system. I reckon this could be described as a risk / rewards system. To me, this system is what makes this game interesting. Some of the tricks you can pull are:

Placing a cluster of bombs to fool your opponent into thinking that your flag is hidden there, since placing bombs near your flag is a common strategy.

If a Marshal wins a battle (and is thus revealed), and the opponent immediately moves a piece near his or her back row, the player with the just-revealed Marshal may assume that this piece is the Spy when, in fact, the Spy may be several spaces away (and already close to the Marshal.) This is a common tactic as it may cause the Marshal to move next to the Spy, allowing the Spy to attack first.

A player could threaten a known high-ranking piece (such as the Colonel) with an unrevealed low-ranking piece (perhaps a Sergeant) to convince the opponent to retreat.

These are just some of the things you could do to trick your opponent and get the upper hand in the game.

Target audience:

The target group according to the makers of the game itself says ages 8 and up. I agree but also think that you could go as low as maybe 7 or 6 years old. The only really necessary thing that players need to know in order  to play this game is basic math for when comparing the ranks of the pieces attacking each other  and technically since you could win this game on pure luck I think 6 year olds could play this game without difficulty.

Summary:

All in all I think Stratego was a great game.  It’s a game with rules so simple you’ll understand them fully the first time you play, and yet so open to strategy and cleverness that you’ll never play the same game twice. With its fast setup and addictive play style, it’s the kind of game you find yourself playing twenty rounds of when you only wanted to play one or two. Then there are several elements that help this game stand out and make it less like ordinary chess and more like the strategy board game it really is. First off, this game has a memory type element to it, if the player attacks one of his opponent’s pieces randomly, his or her opponent must then reveal the rank of that piece and this gives you a chance to memorize the location of that piece.  There is a great deal of trickery involved in this game as well.  As stated before, the player can use the position of his unused pieces to fool his opponent into thinking that it is in fact his or her flag.