"In 1999, when we just got Internet at home, I was looking for a game to play online and accidentally came across stratego," he recalls. CreativityDe Boer played Stratego for the first time at age nine, but then abandoned the game very quickly soon after, only to start playing it again years later as an online game. The modern game, with its Napoleonic imagery, was originally produced in the Netherlands by the Jumbo games company. A modern Chinese game, called 'Army Chess' ( Lu Zhan Jun Qi), is also very similar to stratego, as the initial setup isn't fixed, one's opponent's pieces are hidden and the basic gameplay is similar.In its present form, stratego appeared in Europe before World War I as a game called ' L'attaque', which was designed by a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, who patented the game in 1909. The 'Jungle' board, with two lakes in the middle, is similar to Stratego, although in 'Jungle' the pieces’ values aren't hidden from your opponent and the initial setup is fixed.
"Both games require analytical thinking, but whereas chess requires you to look as far as you can forward, the challenge in Stratego centers on thinking backwards, remembering as much as you can about the game history and then drawing conclusions from this."Stratego's origins can be traced back to the traditional Chinese board game, 'Jungle', (also known as 'Game of the Fighting Animals' ( Dou Shou Qi), which also has pieces (of animals, not soldiers) with different ranks.
While similar to chess, stratego is different in that it's an abstract strategy game, where information is hidden and incomplete: you cannot see the ranks of your opponent's pieces, and the positions of these pieces aren't fixed.Vincent de Boer, a computer science student at TU Delft who became the World Champion of Stratego for the third time this year, says there are probably more differences than similarities between chess and stratego. Just like in real warfare, the board game stratego features an army of marshals, generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants and spies who fight to conquer the opponent‘s flag, or to capture so many pieces that the opponent cannot move.
So what is Stratego and what does it take to become a world champion?