Strategy on a Summer’s Day

Remember those long, lazy days of your childhood summer vacation? How you waited all year for this time to arrive? With the sound of Alice Cooper singing “No more paper, no more school books, no more teacher’s dirty looks” and “School’s out for SUMMER!” still playing in your mind, you were faced with the task of finding something to do with all that free time.

The solution: board games. What better way to spend a warm summer afternoon than on the front porch in front of your favorite board game?

Two of the most popular (and my personal favorites) were Battleship and Stratego. Read on and jog your memories of these games and their histories.

What variants of these games exist today? And what lessons were being taught? In strategy games you learned a lot. How ironic. Children who could not wait to get out of school quickly took to games that would enhance their learning.

Battleship

Originally a pencil and paper game, Battleship was published as a board game by Milton Bradley in1931. I would not be surprised if it was invented by a math teacher with an ulterior motive: teaching students how to plot coordinates on a graph. You might remember the commercial for this game, "Hey! You sunk my battleship!" That is what you longed to hear your opponent say.

How to play:
The game is designed for two players. Both players receive boards to play on. The game I had as a child consisted of two plastic boxes that opened with a grid on the bottom and top of the box. The bottom grid was where you put your ships because the opponent wasn’t able to see them. The top grid was where you plotted your hits and misses.

Each side received one aircrcarrier [5 spaces], one battleship [4 spaces], one destroyer [3spaces], two cruisers [two spaces] and one submarine [one space]. The ships must be placed either horizontally or vertically and cannot overlap. Play begins with one player calling out coordinates. If it results in a hit you get another turn. If all the grids are hit that a ship occupies, your opponent calls out “You sunk my battleship!” and removes the piece from the board after revealing its identity. So a person can actually win without the other person ever going. Possible, but highly unlikely.

Variations
Variations of this game allow for the players to fire shots from their whole fleet. For example, if your fleet is the complement I described in this article, you would fire 17 coordinates in your first salvo because that is how many spaces your fleet occupies. And any ship lost weakens your fire power. There is an electronic version of the game that features sound effects. The game is still played today as a board game and also in electronic format. (See http://boardgamecentral.coml)

Stratego

Another all-time boomer favorite is Stratego. Check out pictures on Ed Collin’s Stratego site that illustrate how the game evolved through time.The game Stratego first appeared on the scene just before WWI when a woman named Mademoiselle Hermace Edan obtained a patent for a battle game with movable board pieces in 1908, according to Thierry Depaulis article on Ed’s site.

The 1910 game featured two armies in red and blue with the same rules as modern day Stratego, but the pieces were rectangular cardboard and featured soldiers of the 1900s rather than the later version’s Napoleonic War pieces.

The modern game was published by a Dutch company named Jumbo and was licensed by Milton Bradley in 1961. Jumbo released variations that have included three and four players. They also came up with a new cannon piece that can jump two squares to capture any piece but that loses to any attack. Another variation is called Barrage, which has fewer pieces and is faster moving.

How to play

The object of the game is to capture your opponent’s flag or at least enough of your opponent’s pieces to render him or her incapable of capturing yours. Stratego consists of a 10" x 10" board with forty playing pieces. One player is red the other blue.

Each piece has two sides. One side, the side your opponent sees, is colored blue or red. The other side contains a number that is equivalent to a military rank. Each piece is awarded a military rank and number with the exception of the flag, spy and bomb pieces. The numbered (ranked) pieces go from 1-9, the lower the number the stronger the piece.

Players place their pieces face down, or face away from each other and try to figure out where the flags are while avoiding hidden bombs or attacking a higher ranked piece.The strongest piece is the marshall, which is assigned the #1. Any piece he attacks that is higher than that number is taken from the board. If a spy attacks him, he is removed. Any piece attacking a bomb is removed from the board.

Some good strategies may include pretending to move a bomb or leading your opponent to believe the spy is far away from the marshal when he is actually close by. A cluster of bombs in one area will lead your opponent to believe he has found the flag.

You could learn a bit about military ranking from this game I suppose, but keeping track of what numbers are left and the placement of the numbered pieces is the key. In other words, another math lesson.

—Frank

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