![]() Losing a piece to an opponent's piece always reveals the rank of the opponent's stronger piece in return. HobbyBesides the ability to calculate tactical and strategic plans based on the received information, a good memory is fundamentally important in stratego. For the clever player, this layout gives clues as to where his opponent's stronger and weaker pieces are positioned, and most importantly where the flag is located. Players cannot move across the two lakes pictured on the battlefield, and as such the lakes serve as obstacles that make frontal attacks more difficult.By following the patterns of movement of the opponent's pieces, the player can unravel the structure of his opponent's initial layout. Players then move their pieces forward seeking confrontation with their opponent's pieces. This initial layout of the pieces fundamentally influences the outcome of the game. The rank of a piece is revealed when a piece is moved onto a square occupied by an opposing piece.Before a game starts, the players arrange their armies of 40 pieces each on the 10x10 square board in an order that they deem most appropriate for victory. So this aspect gives lots of room for your own creativity."In stratego, the opponent's piece is captured if, following a piece-to-piece confrontation, your piece turns out to be of a higher rank than your opponents. ![]() ![]() De Boer: "Unlike chess, you can't get far in stratego by just repeating standard openings. Tricking your opponent into making misjudgments is an important part of the game. Although I felt a lot better about my play heading into this year's tournament, it was hard to really expect that I'd win."According to De Boer, every stratego game is different, because part of the game is to do something your opponent doesn't expect, while trying to find out what it is your opponent is trying to make you believe. Within a year of having started playing in real life tournaments, he became one of the top five players in the Netherlands, a country where the game is very popular.Although De Boer had won the world championship in 20, this year's victory was a complete surprise for him: "In last year's World Championships I ended in a disappointing 12th place. "I got addicted after the first game."De Boer turned out to be a talented stratego player from the outset. "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?
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