In 19, Hausemann and Hotte (H&H) took on the European and global licenses respectively. Jacques Johan Mogendorff registered the name as a trademark in 1942 and licensed the game to Dutch company Smeets and Schippers four years later. Stratego itself came into existence in the early 1940s. The pieces had pictures of French soldiers in modern uniform (modern in the early 1900s, anyway) as opposed to the Napoleonic emblems that feature later on in Stratego.īritish board game and jigsaw puzzle producer H.P Gibson & Sons (later just Gibson) bought the rights to L’Attaque in 1925 and began selling it here, using the same name. The rules to L’Attaque were much the same as Stratego is now, although it was played on a 9 x 10 board and each player only had 36 pieces to move. A year later, the French Patent Office granted the patent and by 1910 a game called L’Attaque was being sold via a manufacturer. In 1908, a patent was filed by a French woman, Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, for ‘a battle game with mobile pieces on a game board’ (although, obviously, she filed it in French). Where are you going to hide your flag and how will you protect it? How are you going to find your opponent’s bombs and remove them, without losing too many of your own personnel? Are you going to send your big guns straight out into the field or employ some lower ranking troops to prepare the ground first? (See, I told you I took it very seriously…)Ī game similar to Stratego has been in around in various formats for over 100 years. ![]() The game allows you to strategically think out your moves. Once you know which pieces your enemy has, and where, you can use a higher rank to get rid of them. ![]() This ploy means that you will generally lose any Scout that you send out on reconnaissance but you have multiples of these initially so they are fairly expendable. They are able to move any number of empty spaces in a straight line and can be used to test out unknown enemy pieces (when confronted, your opponent must tell you what rank you have approached). The Scouts are a crucial part of your battle plan. For this reason, this makes the Spy one of the most useful pieces in the game but as it is vulnerable to all of the other ranks it is worth protecting it heavily. The Marshal, for instance, can take out anybody on the board but can only be removed by the Spy so many players will use the Marshal to protect their flag. As you’d expect, the higher the rank, the more lower-ranked pieces they can eradicate. Vice versa, if theirs is more decorated than yours then your piece is the one to leave the game. When you land on a square containing your challenger’s soldier you are able to remove them from the board if your piece has a higher ranking than theirs. You take it in turns to have your go, moving each piece one space at a time (bar the Scout more of which later). Once you have placed your flag and bombs you are not able to move them for the duration of the game, except when a bomb has been triggered as it is then taken out of play. The only servicemen immune to explosions are the Sappers: they are able to diffuse the bombs and proceed past them. These must be tactically placed on your side of the board in the hope that the opposing side’s troops will stumble into them and blow themselves up. ![]() You can lay them out on the board in whatever order or pattern you like, with their ranks facing you.Īlongside all of the ranked troops you also have a number of bombs. This is achieved by strategically arranging some of your troops to defend your flag while simultaneously forging others forward to take theirs.Įach player begins the battle with one Marshall, one General, one Spy, two Colonels, three Majors, four Captains, four Lieutenants, four Sergeants, five Sappers and eight Scouts. The purpose of the game is to both protect your flag (one of the pieces) and capture your opponent’s. Each piece represents a member of your platoon (different rankings from Spy and Scout up to Marshal) or an object. It’s a brilliant game: two players each control a 40 piece army on a board made up of 10 x 10 squares. It’s a hollow boast, I realise, but I never, ever lost a game of Stratego. Woe betides anybody – and generally my beloved granddad was the only person who would put up with my histrionics during game play – who got in my way. When I played Stratego I became a focused military commander: organising my troops to ruthlessly annihilate the enemy. ![]() I was never a competitive child, especially when it came to board games, with the exception of Stratego.
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