The funny thing is that the art looks straight out of Heroscape, down to the "Lava Monster" creature that looks a hell of a lot like a Marro Warrior, if you know what that is. Not so any more, because with this latest "Fire And Ice" version, gone are the military ranks, replaced by mostly generic fantasy wankers such as the Dragon, Mage, Elf, and Dwarf. The only way to know what rank the other guy's piece is was to attack it, which forced you to make incredibly tough decisions that delivered a very palpable tension. Anyhow, it had Marshals, Colonels, Captains, and so on down the ranks to the lowly Scout only a very few pieces had any powers, and in almost all cases, the guy with the stronger piece would win an individual battle. Never trust a guy with a pornstache, says I, and that skeevy pervert totally looks like he's got some children locked in a basement somewhere. The first copy I ever saw was the 1970's version that had a Colonel Mustard-looking guy smiling across the board at you, holding a piece. Unfortunately, with regard to the new advanced rules, they literally destroyed what made classic Stratego what it is. Further, as I realized just recently after reflecting upon a thread at Fortress: Ameritrash, this is actually a hybrid combat/deduction game. All I know is that when I saw this sitting at my local Goodwill store for 4 bucks, complete, I could not help but buy it to see whether my nostalgia for the game was ill-conceived.Īs it turns out, now that I've been playing hobby games for a great while, I understand with great clarity that this game is literally a great grandfather to games like Dungeon Twister, or other more European style confrontational games. To me, this speaks to the broad appeal and longevity of the game's core mechanics, and to Hasbro's apparent ideology that freshening up games for the iPad generation can sell more units. Recent versions have tried to spice up (read: bastardize) the game with all kinds of new skins and special powers, such as a Lord of the Rings and Star Wars version, and this latest iteration, a generic fantasy version. If you haven't heard of the old Hasbro game, Stratego, you've been hiding under a rock for 30 years. It's actually quite brilliant, according to her gleeful smiles as she trounced the shit out of me not via luck, but by being a clever little turd. She immediately fell deeply in love with it, because it's simple to learn, relatively quick, but has enough strategy to feel like it's not a total waste of time. Anyhow, a couple nights back we broke out Stratego: Fire and Ice, and playing the basic "classic" rules, we played a couple of games. This game is a must for all Stratego lovers and others who enjoy playing board games on their computer, but for those who either don’t like Stratego or just want to play Stratego with human players, this game can be overlooked.Over spring break I've been introducing my 12 year old daughter to some of my more advanced games because most of her friends are away with family and whatnot, but since we're moving soon we're preserving our vacation time for the move and so here she sits, with only a couple of neighborhood friends to hang with. The sound is horrifying, at least on my computer where the sound is a long, extremely irritating BEEP. Well, there are no real graphics but only a flat table with blue and red rectangles that have drawings inside. The mightiest piece on the board, the marshal (1) can only be captured (removed) by the spy and, of course, he will get blown away if he attacks the bomb.Īnd now a few details about the game design. A bomb kills everyone that attacks it, except for the miner, who disarms it. There are some special rules though, like that the bombs and flags do not move. So if your captain (5) attacks a sergeant (7) you win the battle and the sergeant is removed from the battlefield. This is determined by the character’s strength which is displayed on the card – the lower the number, the stronger the character is. If you move your piece to a square which is occupied by your enemy’s figure, one of the figures is sent out of the battlefield. In each turn you move one of your pieces either one square vertically or horizontally. In order to do so you control forces that vary from bombs to spies and everything else there is in between. Your mission is to find the other players flag and defend your own. The well-known board game, Stratego, is a game about strategy.
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