Stratego game review

My brother and I loved strategy games growing up. The games fed into our sibling rivalry and our need to beat each other. Because of this we both developed a love/hate relationship with the game Stratego.

Stratego is a two player strategy game. Blue and red armies take to a field of battle. The genius mechanic is that you don’t know the strength of the enemy pieces. The armies are placed with all of the information facing their own player. The backs of the pieces are a uniform blank of their colour. This makes Stratego a capture the flag style game of deceit, bluffing, guesswork and memory.

Each moveable piece is given a value. Older games use 1 through 9 as well as S for spy. Newer versions use numbers 1 through 10. Units that cannot move are bombs and flags. The most powerful unit in the game is the Marshal which is a 1 in old games or a 10 in newer reprint versions. When units encounter each other the strongest unit wins and the weakest is removed from the board. If the units are of equal strength both are removed from the board. An exception to this is the bombs which kill anyone except the miner/sapper which defuses bombs. Another exception is the spy, which can kill the Marshal if the spy attacks first; he loses if the marshal attacks him.

The game is won when one player captures the other player’s flag.

Placement strategy is often what makes or breaks a game of Stratego. Often players place the flag in the back row surrounded by bombs for protection. Other strategies involve placing the flag in the bluff behind one of the lakes where the other player wouldn’t look for it. Most often inexperienced players will place their flag first then build a strategy around that giving away their flag position in setup.

Most of this game is played by mercilessly sacrificing weaker pieces in order to build an idea of the opponent’s placement, admittedly not the best lesson for children to learn. However what is great for children is learning to memorize piece placement from past encounters. The blind play is effective in levelling the play between novice and veteran players.

My brother and I developed a love/hate relationship with Stratego because the blind placement/fog of war feel makes the game interesting. This really increases the strategy of the game however the actual battle tactics of the game feel limited. After plating for a while the guess and go mechanic gets a little old. Analysis paralysis becomes a big issue when a player begins to second guess their position. Having said that I do enjoy an occasional game every once in a while.

To sum up Stratego can be a fun strategy game. While it does have some novel rules and mechanics the novelty can wear off after a while. I do like the game but there are much better strategy games out there. I recommend Stratego for players who want to be able to switch up their strategy game night on occasion. I also recommend Stratego for those willing to teach inexperienced strategy gamers as it is great for learning the value of unit placement.