Each player controls 40 pieces representing individual officer and soldier ranks in an army.

Stratego has simple enough rules for young children to play but a depth of strategy that is also appealing to adults.

The United States trademark was filed in 1958 and registered in 1960 to Jacques Johan Mogendorff and is presently owned by Jumbo Games as successors to Hausemann and Hotte, headquartered in the Netherlands.

It has been licensed to manufacturers such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and others, as well as retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Target stores, etc.

This description is of the original and classic games; many variant shapes and colors of pieces and boards have been produced in the decades since.

They are shown as lakes on the battlefield and serve as choke points to make frontal assaults less direct.

All movable pieces, with the exception of the Scout, may move only one step to any adjacent space vertically or horizontally (but not diagonally).

[8] Even before that, sanctioned play usually amended the original Scout movement to allow moving and striking in the same turn because it facilitates gameplay.

Those interfaces use an algebraic-style notation that numbers the rows ('ranks') 1 to 10 from bottom to top and the columns ('files') A to J from left to right.

In addition to calculated sequences of moves, this gives rise to aspects of battle psychology such as concealment, bluffing, lying in wait and guessing.

Japanese Military Chess (Gunjin Shogi) has been sold and played since as early as 1895, although it is not known by whom and when it was invented.

It seems, only after reading his article, Julie Berg took out a patent on a war game in London and Paris in 1907.

[12] In nearly its present form Stratego appeared in France from La Samaritaine in 1910, and then in Britain before World War I, as a game called L'Attaque.

[13][14] Historian and game collector Thierry Depaulis writes:[15] It was in fact designed by a lady, Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, who filed a patent for a "jeu de bataille avec pièces mobiles sur damier" (a battle game with mobile pieces on a gameboard) on 1908-11-26.

The name was registered as a trademark in 1942 by the Dutch company Van Perlstein & Roeper Bosch N.V. (which also produced the first edition of Monopoly).

After Mogendorff's death in 1961, Hausemann and Hotte purchased the trademark from his heirs, and sublicensed it to Milton Bradley (which was acquired by Hasbro in 1984) in 1961 for United States distribution.

The change from wood to plastic was made for economical reasons, as was the case with many products during that period, but with Stratego the change also served a structural function: Unlike the wooden pieces, the plastic pieces were designed with a small base.

American editions later introduced new rectangular pieces with a more stable base and colorful stickers, not images directly imprinted on the plastic.

[24] Each type of playing piece in Electronic Stratego has a unique series of bumps on its bottom that are read by the game's battery-operated touch-sensitive "board".

[24]: 28–33 A player who successfully captures the opposing Flag is rewarded with a triumphant bit of music from the 1812 Overture.

Starting in the 2000s, Hasbro, under its Milton Bradley label, released a series of popular media-themed Stratego editions.

In July 2022, DeepMind announced the development of DeepNash, a model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning system capable of playing Stratego at the level of a human expert.

[citation needed] A more elaborate and complex Chinese game known as Land Battle Chess (Lu Zhan Qi) or Army Chess (Lu Zhan Jun Qi) is a similar board game to Stratego, with a few differences: It is played on a 5×13 board with two un-occupiable spaces in the middle, and each player has 25 playing pieces.

The setup is not fixed, both players keep their pieces hidden from their opponent, and the objective is to capture the enemy's flag.

[2] Lu Zhan Jun Qi's basic gameplay is similar, though differences include "missile" pieces and a xiangqi-style board layout with the addition of railroads and defensive "camps".

Michael Graves Design Stratego by Milton Bradley introduced in 2002 and sold exclusively through Target Stores.

It features a finished wood box, wooden pedestal board, and closed black and white roughly wedge-shaped plastic pieces.

Instead of using ranks, the different historical units that had actually fought at the battle were added as Pawns (Old Guard, 95th Rifles...) – each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The game features a smaller 8×10 board and each player has 30 magical and mythological themed pieces with special powers.

The game is particularly popular in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, USA and Belgium, where live and online championships are organized.