There's no luck at all, and every move is an important decision. I started looking at the way the game is set up, the actual design of it, and I realized that it is the epitome of a Euro game. So, back to the "classic" game, my friends. Anyhow, the rules are really simple, even using the Fire and Ice rules, so it's not a big deal to learn or teach, and to a 12 year old, no less, and it only really takes 45 minutes to play, so it's actually a great little 2-player filler game. Pretty funny shit, you'd think someone would've proofread, especially at a mega-corporation like Hasbro. My major complaint is that my board has the wrong power names written on the character images on one side of the board, so instead of "Flight" or "Detect Unit", they all say "Quickness", although the power descriptions are right. It's not really bad, although the board art is a bit on the lazy side, but rather it's just so damned generic and cartoony looking that it's hard to take it very seriously. It's hard for me to really define what the art looks like it's somewhere between Larry Elmore and whoever did the art on Heroscape. The stickers on some of my pieces are awry, which gives credence to my thoughts on the subject. In addition, I am incredibly happy I didn't have to sticker these myself, thanks to the previous owner, because there's like 100 pieces and the stickers have to sit in this little recessed area which I cannot see being anything but a white-hot bitch to get in there right. Gone is the medium sized, rectangular box and now the box is a small square, making it easier to put on shelves with newer-style games. Regarding the art and components, the board a nice looking four-fold design which I love because it's small enough to take up very little room, and the components are of the usual new-style "castle" design with sticker faces. I'd argue that it's not that the new rules are "bad" in the sense that they don't work, it's that 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. 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.
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