Stratego

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Stratego
Stratego
Stratego
Game data
author Jacques Johan Mogendorff
publishing company Smeets & Schippers (1946),
Jumbo (1958),
Milton Bradley (1961),
and others
Publishing year 1946, 1958, 1961
Art Board game
Teammates 2
Duration 60 minutes
Age from 8 years

The game Stratego is a board game for two players, in which the players have to try to conquer the flag of their opponent with their various pieces. The game, to which Hausemann & Hötte (Jumbo Spiele) owns the rights, was sold over 40 million times worldwide by 2006.

history

The Dutchman Jacques Johan Mogendorff is considered to be the inventor of Stratego.

The game is apparently a plagiarism of a game that was patented in France by Hermance Edan as early as 1909 and was sold as L'Attaque from 1910 by Au jeu retrouvé and later by Gibson Games . From the First World War onwards, several games with similar rules were published by different manufacturers in Europe.

On April 20, 1942, the Stratego brand was registered to the Dutch company Van Perlstein & Roeper Bosch. It is unclear whether Stratego was then also produced in 1942.

After the Second World War , Mogendorff licensed Stratego between 1946 and 1951 to the Dutch publisher Smeets & Schippers, which produced the game from 1946. According to Jumbo, the game wasn't a great success.

In 1958, the Stratego brand, registered in 1942, was transferred to Jaques Johan Mogendorff. Thereupon Mogendorff granted on June 10, 1958 a Europe-wide license to the Dutch game publisher Hausemann & Hötte (Jumbo games). In the first year, 15,000 games were sold across Europe. In 1959 the license was expanded into a worldwide license and Hausmann & Hötte issued a sub-license to Milton Bradley . In America the game was successfully introduced in 1961 by Milton Bradley. In 1962, Mogendorff's widow Sientjen Vromen sold the copyright to Stratego and the American trademark to Hausemann & Hötte. In 1962 100,000 games were sold worldwide, in 1967 more than 300,000 and in 1980 alone more than 700,000 games. Milton Bradley and Hasbro , which took over Milton Bradley in 1984, sold approximately 10 million games through 2005 and paid more than $ 5 million in royalties to Hausemann & Hötte.

Strategy

In 2005, Hasbro was sued that Stratego was a copy of the game Strategy registered by Gunter Sigmund Elkan on May 25, 1948 in Canada and the United States . This lawsuit was dismissed: the games were essentially identical, but it was shown that the Stratego brand was registered as early as 1942 and the game was produced as early as 1946.

Game description

Overview

Stratego setup example
Computer version of the stratego game board

Each of the two players receives 40 pawns. They are based on the hierarchical structure of an army ( ranks ) and accordingly have different levels of play: as a rule, a piece can only defeat lower ranks. Every army has a flag that must be defended. At the beginning of the game, each player places his figures in any order on the 4 rows of the board (10 × 10 fields) that are closest to him. The ranks of the pieces are initially unknown to the opponent. By alternately pulling one piece each, the players try to hit the opposing flag or immobilize the opponent, which wins the game. If a figure attacks an opposing figure ( queries ), both players announce the rank of their figure and the lower-ranking figure is removed from the field (see below for exceptions). If they have the same rank, both pieces are removed from the field.

A tie outcome of the game (draw) is possible if

  1. it the players agree or
  2. In tournaments with a time limit, the specified game time has expired.

The game board

The basis of the game board is a grid with ten by ten fields. The two middle rows are interrupted by two square lakes, which may not be entered and which each take up the space of four fields; the board thus consists of a total of 92 fields.

The figures

Figures in descending hierarchical order, with number for each player:

  1. 6 × bomb (immobile, hits every attacker except the miner)
  2. 1 × Field Marshal (X) (can only be hit by bombs and the attacking spy)
  3. 1 × General (★★★★)
  4. 2 × Colonel (★★★)
  5. 3 × major (★)
  6. 4 × captain
  7. 4 × lieutenant
  8. 4 × NCO
  9. 5 × miner (the only figure who can hit bombs)
  10. 8 × scouts (can move horizontally or vertically, but not over other pieces or lakes; like a rook in chess )
  11. 1 × spy (beats the field marshal if the spy is the attacking figure)
  12. 1 × flag (immovable; is beaten by each figure; conquering it means victory.)

Except for the scouts, bombs and flags, the figures can move horizontally or vertically one space, i.e. to the directly adjacent space. Any direction is possible, only the edge of the board, fields occupied by your own figures and the two inaccessible lakes are obstacles.

Course of the game

The players take turns drawing. You move by moving one of your pieces to another space, which can be empty or occupied by an opposing piece. In the second case the opposing figure is attacked and both players learn the rank of the opposing figure. The lower of the two is beaten and taken off the board, unless the spy attacks the field marshal or a miner attacks a bomb. In these cases the field marshal or the bomb is hit. If two pieces of the same rank meet, both are removed from the game. Otherwise, the capturing piece remains on the target space of the move. d. H. on the field of the attacked figure.

You may not move a piece back and forth between the same two spaces more than three times without making another move in between (two-space rule). It doesn't matter whether the piece moving back and forth also attacks and hits opposing pieces.

It is not allowed to hunt one or more enemy pieces indefinitely, i. H. repeatedly threatening your own piece by moving it to a field from where it could attack the chased piece in the next move (ISF multi-field rule): The hunting player may not make a move that would create a position of the piece that would existed in the game before. However, it is allowed at any time to drive a piece back to a square from which it came in the immediately preceding move, as long as this does not violate the two-square rule.

Strategic

Stratego player

Since the opposing figure ranks are not known at the beginning, the players feel their way around in the first moves and look for clues as to where the weak points, the highest figures, the bombs and the flag are. They make sure to keep the losses low. Requested figures are immediately turned around again, so that an important achievement of the player is to remember the figures. The middlegame is mostly about converting the information gained into a figure overweight. Tactical skills are required here. The means are deception, taking limited risk, and choosing suitable pieces for attack and defense. In the endgame, either the weaker player is worn down while he seeks his last chance with desperate attacks, or both push towards the assumed position of the opposing flag and have to skillfully weigh attack and defense.

Threat posed by bombs to mobility:
You should position your figures when building up the army so that your own movement options are not too restricted or important figures are not available at the beginning. This is the case, for example, if the immovable bombs are set up in such a way that several additional moves are necessary to bypass them with the other figures.

Immediate impact versus protection for later:
In addition, it is conceivable that a player has positioned his strong pieces in the back field in order to protect them initially, but can hardly push through a possibly particularly strong front of the opponent.

Protected versus free flag:
An important consideration is whether to protect your flag behind bombs or position it freely. Tournament players usually set them up against weaker players behind bombs so as not to take any risks, and free against stronger players so that they can be found more difficult when you have already moved all moving pieces, because the opponent then knows the positions of the stationary ones (flags and bombs ). However, in order not to be predictable, a large repertoire of variants is always chosen.

Information about figure superiority:
Beginners in particular concentrate heavily on winning figures and are therefore more likely to let the opponent attack. However, advanced players know how to use information that they gain through targeted queries later, which can outweigh the initial disadvantage.

Flexibility in relation to protection:
In order to be able to react as well as possible to attacks by the opponent, it sometimes makes sense to move many of his figures and bring them into optimal position. On the other hand, it is often better to use only a few figures so that the opponent does not yet know about the others whether they are bombs and so that there is little information about the position of the flag. The more the opponent knows about the position, the more likely he is to step forward and take a risk.

Speed ​​versus camouflage: It can
often be useful to move a scout that is still unknown to the enemy, like all other figures, so as not to reveal his rank without a fight. This is especially true if a special, not directly reachable opposing figure is to be investigated or the opposing spy is the target of the attack.

Tournaments

Especially in the Netherlands , but also in German-speaking countries, the USA and some Eastern European countries, Stratego is played at a high level and regular tournaments are held. The resulting world rankings are dominated by Dutch players. Players like Vincent de Boer and Erik van den Berg have been establishing themselves in the top ranks for years.

In Germany, the game was initially organized in individual regions in the 1970s and 1980s, and a networked scene did not develop until the 1990s. The Dutch association played an important role in this. There have been German championships since 1993, which were initially held in the knockout system . Since 1997 they have been taking place according to the Swiss system . Tournaments take place regularly in almost all federal states. The first online tournaments were also held.

The first World Cup took place in 1997 in London. Erik van den Berg holds the record with four titles, followed by Vincent de Boer with three titles. For the first time in 2009, a German player, Steffen Annies, won the world championship with eight wins and two defeats in ten rounds. In the same year, Ansgar Pausch, another German, achieved the title of Junior World Champion.

swell

  • The Marshal Plan. Germany's official Stratego newspaper, has been published since 1999.

Web links

Stratego-like games are offered on some game servers on the Internet under the name Sabotage ( ItsYourTurn ) or Espionage ( BrainKing ). The most important differences to the Stratego:

  • You move two to five (depending on the game variant) pieces per turn, otherwise the game on the turn-based servers is quite tedious. It is not possible to move a figure several times or more to the same target space, but a figure can move to a space that has previously become free in the same move.
  • In an attack you do not find out the rank of the opposing piece, but only which of the two is defeated.
  • If the pieces are of the same rank, only the attacked one is defeated.
  • Instead of the scout there is the figure Recon (sabotage) or Spy (espionage), which makes the rank of the orthogonally or diagonally adjacent opposing figures visible. Like the other figures, she can only move one square orthogonally.
  • The roles of miners (defusing bombs) and spies (beating the highest-ranking movable figure) are summarized in one type of figure: the saboteur (for sabotage) or sapper (for espionage).
  • Repetitions are allowed, but a piece may not move to a space from which it was moved in the immediately preceding move.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Press release from January 26, 2006 (PDF) from Jumbo@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.jumbo-presse.de
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Judgment of the descendants of Gunter Sigmund Elkan vs Hasbro (PDF; 54 kB) at the Oregon District Court on November 18, 2005 (English)
  3. ↑ Patent FR396795 : Jeu de bataille avec pièces mobile sur damier. ‌
  4. ↑ L'Attaque in the BoardGameGeek game database , accessed on October 11, 2019.
  5. ↑ Stratego at the European Game Collectors Guild
  6. ↑ a b c d e 50 jaar Stratego - een zegetocht! ( Memento from March 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) at Jumbo (Dutch)
  7. ↑ A Short History of Stratego ( Memento from January 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on Ed's Stratego Site (English)