I think this is my last episode here:
Actually forgot about this one until now! Which is incredible as it was my favorite game for a long time. It’s hard as a kid, even when you win you kind of know that you’re getting help. If you don’t see you parents making outright stupid moves and talking unnaturally about a flawed thought process, they might be giving you undos or pointing out something on the board that you are obviously missing.
Stratego was the one game I felt I could win for real against my Dad. I had an excellent memory for tracking his pieces. And I delighted in the turn zero strategy. Yes, there were some stupid learning moments (Oh, if I put TWO rows of bombs around the flag then… the miner just clears them both…)
But I loved trying different strategies and setups, the bluffing and information tracking, sending in that 3 or that Spy at just the right moment, etc.
These days it’s Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation instead but, you know, there’s really nothing wrong with Stratego.
Except the people who say “Strat-uh-joe.” Those people are not welcome in my house.
Oh, my, gosh, Becky.
I played this at a friend’s house and then begged my parents for months until it was a Christmas or Birthday present. The scale of that thing (the original was a single piece of molded plastic.) We did everything with this board. We turned it upside down and played on the backside. We filled it with water. We ran marbles down the river just for fun.
When we actually tried to play there was always vagaries and ambiguities. We came back to it a few years ago (I still have this next to Torpedo Run) and the rules indeed are wonky around card timing and priority and fireball procedure. But who cares. It was so great just to climb that mountain, steal the jewel, chase each other down, get knocked off that damn bridge… It’s not a new statement but dang, Ameritrash wasn’t always tight, polished, or fair, but it was evocative and fun. Fun is good.
And yes, we played this just a few years back. That’s my Dad triumphantly hoisting the Jewel of Vul’kar. We had all the same arguments about ambiguous rules, what cards could be played when, order of card resolution, etc. But we’re adults and we worked through it and had the same old blast.
So no surprises here. This was just so central to everything. This was one of the few games I owned back then, as opposed to playing my friends’ games. I don’t expect everyone to track the details of my life but I think I wrote about this all in the “How I got into games” thread we did a while back. Short version - I played this two (five) handed. I played two player. We would organize 5 player sleepovers and play all night until we inevitably lost track of the game. I memorized the setup.
I loved playing Germany, as I felt I had a good handle on their strategy and could push back Britain and Russia (I would go for Africa for economic superiority). I also really enjoyed Britain, as it was the most flexible for non-standard strategies. Factory in South Africa, Factory in India. Once I put a factory in Australia to take it to Japan but that strategy was too slow (the goal was to get the US into Europe faster).
As I’ve grown I of course like less scripted games. And I’ve internalized other perspectives on WWII, rather than just the US experience of distant triumph, so it’s harder to abstract what is happening in the German/Russian front with all those dice. I honestly don’t know if I will play this ever again but I do know I"ll own it until I die.
