Stratego Revisited

Remember the game
Stratego? A kid's game, right? That you probably stopped playing when you were maybe ten, because all the other kids were playing "real" games like chess. Even though there was something strategically delicious about combining strategy with deduction (aka "guessing"). But you grew out of it.

Well, thanks to Ed's Stratego Site, you can now grow right back into it.

Ed's descriptions of Stratego Variations, which number more than 40, do more than breathe new life into an old stand-by. They demonstrate how to make almost any board game new again.

Take, for example, Ed's collection of alternate game boards. Apply the same principle to chess, checkers, even chinese checkers, and all of a sudden what was one game becomes a hundred.

It's this kind of creativity and playfulness that really lies at the heart of what games are all about. No matter how thoroughly a designer tests and develops what he considers to be the very best set of rules, what gives a game life are the rules that other people make up for it.