Ah, cunning indeed! And there's no rule that says you CAN'T do that :)

I do that with "fake scouts" I'll pick up a piece act like I move it across the entire board to only return it to its original spot and move another piece altogether.

@@coachpowers5923 It's also possible to pretend to attack a known bomb with a high ranking piece and then put it back so your opponent will think it's a miner, but I've never actually done that.

This is devious and back-handed. I endorse it fully.

@@dinkmartini3236 It turned out that I wasn't very good at Stratego. I repeatedly played against only one other player when I was in high school and I usually won, making me think that maybe I was good. I found out differently years later.

The only problem with that is that it gives your opponent too much information too early. And there is also the risk of running into a bomb with one of your valuable pieces. As a strategy, it can certainly work, but think it's a pretty risky approach

@@LegendaryTactics agree, however if you use hit&run and sacrifice 2-4 (more 4s as they are pretty useless) figures to research the position the opponent has to reveal himself, and show some moves towards my high figures so this medal has 2 sides. The big advantage is that most players are setting the flag and the bombs on the back line, so you can highly guess when you should use 3s instead of blind attacks from 5-10. Of course you cannot exploit this agressive tactic each and every game on a tournament for example, however in online random it can be a funny one becuase there no online setup statistics

But if you're good at board games and find other people who are going to board games, you would have the best of both worlds

That's why I go play at board game competitions.

Forgot a couple: Never close off a gate with bombs. Never enclose your powerful pieces inside bomb walls during set up (they may never get out).

AND one more: know when to switch your strategy from "capture the flag" to "destroy his moveable pieces" or vice versa.

Ha ha ha, I guess there are certain transferable skills!

It's still a fun little game, I think you'll agree! Thanks for watching!

@@LegendaryTactics Myself made a 20 pieces variant with their Space Themed One, I still enjoy that, my friends like it too.

Likewise. I loved Stratego and played a lot until I discovered AH’s Midway. Don’t think I played it again. And, like another poster asked, when did the numbers get reversed for the ranks?

​@90rightangle2 Yeah it messes with me all the time. So annoying.

That is an interesting variant, which of course relies on the honesty of the defense. Wouldn't it make bombs too powerful though?

Yes, the best thing to do, especially against the same opponent, is to be unpredictable

You're welcome! May you have many years of Stratego dominance!

I'm not sure exactly when, but I think it was just to avoid confusion - 10>1 vs. "I'm number 1, I'm the best there is!"

This is the bane of the game.

the change to 10 Marshals goes before common core. Spies are sometimes S or 1. 1. your first advice is actually quite bad. mid-level pieces like 4s, 5s, 6s -have no special abilities like the 2s and 3s and Spy -are all weaker than all the Sinister Seven -the 7 highest enemy pieces, plus the 6 bombs, plus the 8 Scouts, are a total of 21/40 pieces, or over half, that you don't want to meet. you don't want to meet the pieces that could kill you, and you don't really want to meet the Scouts because they don't give you the information you really want. -at least if you open with Scouts instead of low ranking pieces, you are likely to learn the same things for much cheaper costs. it is very risky to hunt for miners early, so putting out 4s or 5s when you haven't found any of their miners or any of their sergeants is just needlessly risky. your lieutenants and your captains should come out only after you've found one of theirs, or one of their miners. 2. mobility is the key that was not very clearly expressed in the video. despite all the differences from chess, stratego is best thought of like chess, with the flag as the king and the front pieces as the pawn structure. you're right about that. but- -the video did mention the possiblity of controlling the flow of play by picking the which lanes would be blocked and which would be open. it didn't fully show how this can be used, but there are reasons to putting bombs in the front. you have 6 bombs to deploy anywhere you want, and that's more than you need for most Flag Arrays. it's also more than the number of Miners the enemy gets, which is important. if you have a Flag in the middle of the back row, with 3 bombs, it's as hidden as it's going to get, and that array is at its best when the remaining 3 bombs are used: 1 in a corner as a decoy at least 1 in the front row as a surprise: it will affect your movement but it will also affect their as they will have to expose a Miner to your knowledge to remove that Bomb. the last Bomb could be near one of the decoys/traps, or it could another random place and you might be able to kill more than 1 important piece (not just a captain or lieutenant or sergeant, but maybe a Major, a Spy, or get 2 Miners in exchange for 1 Bomb, a good trade) 3. Majors and Colonels advancing is a perfectly legitimate aggressive strategy that will work extremely well if no bombs are present in the first row. either they will score many kills quickly, or they will quickly sniff out the enemy General and Marshall without costing your own, at which point you can plan, at least a collision hoping for a tie, or perhaps gain an immediate winning advantage if your Colonel got too many of their Miners, or located their Lieutenant indicating their Bombs, before they have any idea where your Bombs are. 4. Move fast is not usually Move smart. you want your mobility open but take your time on your move. You can Not assume your opponent will be thrown off. It is one thing to make it hard to predict your bombs, but you just never get lucky enough for your opponent to forget the location of a bomb they already found. they will remember what's important. they will be focused. 5. when i have an advantage, trading down is not so bad, but before the advantage is gained, yes, i do not want to lose pieces. 6. i find that Miners are best together, because they are also best held back rather late. either on 3rd rank or 4th rank. although it is possible that one lane is bomb-blocked, it's uncommon. if there is a trap bomb that is run into once, it must be remembered and not run into again, but unless i suspect the formation is a flag, i don't need to defuse it, walking around it is better. multiple stray Miner parties is more a recipe for having my Miners targeted and picked off 1 by 1. it adds them to my opponent's mental Hit List with the Seven and they'll have a different easier way to get an advantage than winning Officers vs Officers. they'll willing trade Miner for Miner if they get an advantage. with the Miners all going separately, it only makes my opponents' worst pieces better: the 4s 5s and 6s all are like a bomb to a Miner that the Miner cannot defuse. no, Miners are almost always exclusively 4th rank pieces because the Flag herself is almost exclusively a 4th rank piece, although it can be a little different. 7. the large Fortress that attempts to force 2 Miners to be required is interesting because it trades maneuverability on one side and the element of surprise away for the chance to exhaust the opponent's Miners with almost guaranteed success. With a Lieutenant holding the position that can only be reached by the Miner, and the Bombs deterring non-Miners, that Lieutenant does not require more support than maybe 1 good officer- and it can be as low as a Colonel. You see, if you put all of your high officers on the opposite side of the board in a push for massive aggression, you will create so much havoc and destruction you might merely accidentally kill enough Miners to already make it impossible for them to win, and even if you lose some Officers to Bombs and some to ties and some to higher pieces, if you have Marshal, General, Colonel, 3 Captains all together, that's going to be very costly for them to counter and they will absolutely have to move probably their Colonel and their General to meet you, even they get lucky on your Marshal. leaving that Colonel behind at the fort after distracting a Colonel and a General will be very, very powerful defense as well as powerful offence. there isn't a single possible deployment that can stop Marshal + Miner + Spy + Luck, but there's no accounting for luck, and the first Miner sent out is unlikely to be the winning Miner. such a crack team pretty much relies on only having to go through 1 or maybe 2 Bombs, and the Fort layout almost guarantees having to go through 3. if one is clever enough to conserve the use of their bombs, you can make it possible for the opponent to be in a -worse- situation after defusing a bomb instead of a better one. they won't know anything behind that bomb, it will all likely be higher than a Miner, and they maybe had to disrupt their movements to bring the Miner forward. with luck they only discovered the Bomb losing something valued to them, at least a Captain or a Major. the most important truth is that you have 5 Miners, and 6 Bombs, so Defense already has the advantage over Offense, and this can be pushed further.

Don't blame everything on common core. The reversed value of the pieces happened many years ago on some additions of the game. It really doesn't matter which order it is in so long as you know what it is.

Normally, an "attack" involves moving into an opponent's space, so if they are "next to an opponent's pawn", it can't attack in the same turn. Think of it as being similar to Chess in that respect. Moving a pawn next to a opponent's piece doesn't affect it (but it threatens capture next move)

Not sure what you mean here - you're saying that the strategies for both games overlap a bit?

I've actually done this. It takes way too long though. We played risk, and with a bit of proportion calculations we played a game of stratego for each conflict/invasion. It was fun for like the first 5 conflicts or so but became tedious quickly.

Hahaha! You aren't wrong!

Ha ha ha! Devious!

Effective.