The World of Stratego
One of the most pleasant surprises of the physical Mind Sports Olympiad events has been the popularity of the Stratego tournaments. The English-speaking world may not be familiar with just how big this game is - its popularity shines online with a number of tournaments.
The game is a thematic battle between two players, taking place on a stylised battlefield. Each player commands an army of forty pieces. Thirty-three of the pieces represent individual soldiers of varying rank and the final seven represent static features on the battlefield.
The Rules
Six of these static pieces, "bombs", represent traps which cause instant death for unprepared soldiers coming up on them. The seventh static piece is the flag, a sacred territory which must be protected at all costs. If your flag is captured, you lose the game at once.
Players take turns moving one of their soldiers one square forwards, back, left or right. You can only have one of your pieces in a square and you cannot move into the water. Should you move your soldier into a square with a soldier of your opponent, the two soldiers' ranks are compared and the lower-ranking soldier is eliminated from the game. There are a couple of exceptions: only five specific weak soldiers can defuse bombs; the strongest soldier of all, the marshal, is vulnerable to the weakest soldier of all, the spy.
The most distinguishing feature of this game is that pieces are only marked on one side. Players position their pieces so that they can see the pieces' values, but their opponent cannot. Accordingly, you start off not knowing which of your opponents' pieces is which - you need to remember your opponents' actions throughout the game.
Evolution and Variants
Ed Collins reports on his site that the game was patented by Milton Bradley in 1960 and released the year afterwards. Other game historians point towards the ancient Jungle Game of the Orient, where players control teams of animals which follow a similar hierarchy of strengths.
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The game has come out in a number of different editions over the years and has even spawned a few derivative games: Travel Stratego, Stratego 4 for three or four players, Stratego Junior for children, Electronic Stratego which uses electronic battle resolution to preserve the secrecy of soldiers' ranks further still and Avalon Hill's recent "Stratego Legends" release applying a fantasy genre twist by giving certain pieces rule-breaking "magical" powers.
Furthermore, the game has been licensed around the world to other manufacturers. The most succesful edition has been produced in Europe by the German firm Jumbo Spiele which is available all around Europe. The game is extremely popular on the continent with a particularly extensive tournament circuit throughout Germany and the Netherlands.
We have been pleased to feature the first four Stratego World Championships at the Mind Sports Olympiad due to generous support by Jumbo Spiele. Every year we have attracted a large party from the continent, especially from the Netherlands, for a wide variety of individual and national team tournaments. The Dutch team haven't lost a match yet!
One particularly interesting tournament at the Olympiads is in a version of the game called "Barrage", designed to be played in around ten minutes (by comparison, a full game of Stratego is declared to be drawn if it is not complete within an hour and a quarter). It uses the same board as the full game but players only have eight pieces instead of forty. The most interesting pieces have been selected so that strategies from the full game apply.
Computer Versions and Online Stratego
As with any popular mind sport, people have implemented computer game versions. Hasbro Interactive have released the official computer game based upon Stratego. There is a free club designed to promoting play using that version of the game, which runs monthly tournaments and monitors matches for fairness.
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| Stratego action at MSO 4
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However, there are a number of unofficial implementations to let you play the game live, usually programmed in Java. The two most popular are Stratego-Net and WebStratego. Both require registration and WebStratego requires subscription for players who want to take part in more than ten games in all. (If you prefer to play correspondence games, Richard's PBeM server and It's Your Turn both offer ways to play the game over several weeks.)
Both servers have built up substantial communities of fans, some of whom have been dedicated enough to organise tournaments in order to determine their strongest player. Community members habitually refer to themselves by the pseudonyms that they adopt - noms de guerre, if you will - so accordingly we direct you to Stuyvesant's Stratego Page and Botanico's King of Barrage tournament.
Stuyvesant is organising a year-long series of tournaments on the WebStratego server. A ten-round Swiss system tournament takes place over five successive Sundays in each of the winter, the spring, the summer and the autumn. Winners from each of the seasonal tournaments qualify for the grand finals at the end of the year. It's never too late to join this series of tournaments; just show up at the appointed time and join in.
Botanico has organised a tournament in the "Barrage" variant mentioned above. Barrage games are so quick that matches typically consist of "best of five" games. It has a similar format to the football (and chess!) World Cup - top performers in round-robin groups qualify for a single-elimination grand final. At the moment, they are whittling the final 16 down to eight.
We look forward to following the progress of these tournaments in the Mind Sports Zine and will keep you up to date. We also hope to see the top names in person at another great set of Stratego tournaments at the next Mind Sports Olympiad!
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