Game:

Stratego (1990)

Duration: 8:12

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Stratego is a classic strategy board game that simulates the clash of two Napoleonic-era armies. Much like chess, each individual game piece represents a different type of soldier or weapon; unlike chess, the pieces can be placed in any setup the player chooses before the game and each piece’s type is hidden from the opponent, so bluffing and deception are necessary elements of the game. The two armies each have forty pieces, thirty-three of them soldiers of varying ranks and seven of them immobile pieces. Six of the immobile pieces are Bombs that act as land mines, while the seventh is a Flag that must be protected from capture. As for the soldiers, they’re each assigned a military rank, and whenever two pieces battle the higher-ranked piece captures its opponent. In order from strongest to weakest, there’s one Marshal, one General, two Colonels, three Majors, four Captains, four Lieutenants, four Sergeants, five Miners (weak in combat, but the only rank that can disable Bombs), eight Scouts (also weak, but the only piece that can move more than one square per turn), and one Spy (loses to any other rank—except the Marshal, which it can capture).

Stratego doesn’t have nearly as many computer game versions as chess does, but Steam does have one and so I thought I’d do a quick playthrough of it. I start the game and go to Options, where I choose Hard difficulty. From there I select the Battle option, and we’re given a few choices. We can select the terrain of the battlefield; our options are grass, desert and snow. I choose snow for this playthrough. There’s also an Obstacles option, which I leave at default to follow standard Stratego gameplay. Finally, I have to select which army to command. There’s a red army and a blue army, with red getting the first move per rule. I select the red army, and then move to the game map. From here, we have to decide how to set up our pieces. We have four rows of ten squares each to work with, and while I like part of the default layout I make some tweaks. I decide to put our Marshall in the center right behind a Scout, while putting the General on the left flank backed by the Spy. If the enemy Marshal moves against our General, we’ll have the Spy to defend him. Our Flag is already in a good spot—on the back row protected by three Bombs—and I decide to set up a decoy Flag on the other side of the board. I surround that corner with the remaining three Bombs, but put a Sergeant in that spot. The idea is that if an enemy Miner gets through and defuses those Bombs in hopes of capturing our Flag, we’ll take him out. Once I’ve finished setting up our army, I hit “Battle” and the match proper starts.

As with any Stratego game, we have four rows of ten units and the enemy has four rows of ten units. The two sides are separated by two rows, and two large obstacles in those rows create three bottlenecks to the left, center and right. I begin by moving a Scout up the central bottleneck, where he’s quickly dispatched by the enemy Colonel. That’s a good thing, as our Marshal is right nearby and I move him forward, defeating the enemy Colonel and dealing a significant blow to the blue army. After two opposing Scouts clash and kill each other, I’m able to inflict another blow when the enemy tries advancing a Lieutenant into our center—I move a Major in to intercept and kill the opposing officer. From there I try to advance on our left flank, and while our General kills an enemy Major we do suffer a blow when a Scout kills our Spy. That leaves us helpless against the enemy Marshal, whose location is still unknown. I move a Colonel next to our General and have the Major in the center advance into hostile territory, where he locates the enemy Marshal—the blue officer attacks and kills him. We now at least know where he is, and I’m hoping that my own Marshal can deter any adventurism on his part. Meanwhile, the enemy’s moved a piece against our right, and I decide to have a Scout on that side rush the blue piece on the other side. It’s a Bomb, which suggests that the blue Flag is in that area. As such, I have a Miner move in to check it out. He makes it to the Bomb without incident and defuses it, and on the next turn he advances forward. Sure enough, the blue Flag was in the corner, and we capture it to win!

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