Post: #1

If work hasn’t already started on a new Stratego site, I’d like to recommend this as some inspiration for some piece art/animations: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DgRBH42agWs

It’s from a PC Stratego game released in 1998 that I recently remembered playing with some family members at a very young age. It’s been almost 20 years since I last played that game, but it surprisingly still looks quite decent for how old it is. I find the piece movements from this game to be much more interesting than what newer site that recently died had. The Flag also, for example, actually had a person seen holding it, which would’ve been more historically accurate than having nobody holding it (there were no people seen with the flag in the newer art).

I also like all the little animations that take place whenever the units battle. If I remember correctly, there is a completely different animation for every different type of unit that battles. Since the game I am referring to was released in 1998, there shouldn’t be too much difficulty improving these animations and whatnot either, as technology has obviously come a long way since then. Just something to consider. I had a lot of fun playing this game as a young child, even though I barely remember it and didn’t get to play it more than a handful of times.

Post: #2

I also found a match with sound, if anyone is interested:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TgBImh3Y8GU

Post: #3

(02-19-2021 03:23 AM)01AAAAF Wrote:  I also found a match with sound, if anyone is interested:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TgBImh3Y8GU

I agree with a comment made on that video that the way the colonel killed the sergeant was brutal. Though after the way that same sergeant killed the miner, he deserved a brutal death...

Watching this only for the first time it seemed awfully hard to differentiate the pieces, but maybe one could get used to it. The battle animations are indeed entertaining. In 1998 I'm sure this was a great game. But I didn't even own a computer back in 1998. Back then I was busy with kids and a young family. So no time anyway.

I didn't watch the whole match to see if I could detect any movement rule issues. If not perfect, I'm sure it is just as good as the game promoted on Discord today, and probably actually better. Is this game still available? It would be nice to download and play with directly.

Do you know if it had the option for the traditional American piece numberings?

Thanks for sharing.

Post: #4

I honestly don’t remember much about the game. The last time I remember playing it was somewhere between 2005-2007 and I would’ve been roughly 6-8 years old at that time lol. I’m not sure if there is any way to download it now or anything. I remember that there was a disc that you inserted into the PC to play the game. My PC back then had a button like a DVD player has, that you would press to make the disk tray open and then you would just insert the disk to play.

I might even still have the game disk buried in storage somewhere, but I think that’s quite unlikely. It’s been nearly 20 years since I’ve seen that disk and I’m not even sure it would still be compatible with the computer I currently use (even though my iMac is also quite old lol).

I’ll do some more research and see what info I can find about the game. It had a lot of different game modes (like a 2v2 mode with Cannons for example) which was quite fun. The graphics and whatnot would obviously need to be updated since they are a bit outdated at this point, but I really think the overall style of the game could be copied quite easily. I do also agree that piece identification is also a bit of an issue that would need fixing with that game if it was copied. Looking back on that game now, the Graveyard doesn’t seem very convenient and it should probably be next to the board and visible while playing. Some of the animations may also take a bit too long for competitive tournament play, but maybe there could be some way to speed some of them up or something.

Post: #5

So, I did manage to find a place to download this game: https://oldpcgaming.net/stratego/

The steps to download and run the game properly are listed in the comments of the article. Unfortunately, my PC is apparently too old to be able to download and run the game properly.

I did also manage to find the original game disk available for sale on Amazon. The price for a “new condition” disk was around $50 and I found “used condition” disks for around $2.99. I am not sure about the compatibility of these discs with newer PCs. I’m also not really sure I want to spend money on a game that was released in 1998 (which I may still have a copy of somewhere) but I may be tempted to get a used copy purely for nostalgia if I can’t find the copy of the game I already own.