Stratego

A couple weeks ago Andrew had a few days off from school and spent his days with William and me. William was over the moon excited to have his 'best friend' back, in fact the first day we never left the house, they played and played and played all day long. (Only taking breaks for lunch and to go get Natalie at school.) The second day, after we dropped Natalie off at school, we went by my house to play with the army guys Ben and I have recently acquired. Ben requested a few months ago that we drop by a Toys R Us and pick up a cheap bucket of army guys, assuring me they would be a bit hit with William. Ben recounted numerous childhood memories of setting up scenes all around his parents house and spending hours playing with the troops. (Funny I'm the only daughter in my family NOT married to an 'army guy' now...)

The troops are a big hit with William, I occasionally find a battle scene on one of our bookshelves or in a corner long after we thought we cleaned everything up. William has even made up a game including dice. Here are the rules:

• Roll a 1 = You take out 1 of your opponents guys
• Roll a 2 = You take out 2 of your opponents guys
• Roll a 3 = You take out 3 of your opponents guys
• Roll a 4 = You take out 4 of your opponents guys
• Roll a 5 = You take out one of their larger weapons (a tank, helicopter, jet, cannon etc.)
• Roll a 6 = You die, your weapon has back fired

After the boys played army guys for a while I brought out one of my favorite battle games. Stratego. I played many many many a game of Stratego with the first boy I nannied, Sam, 10-ish years ago. Sam and I would get very competitive playing Stratego, I can remember being legitimately upset if I lost too many games in a row. I first discovered my passion for winning board games while playing a round with Sam. Ha!

Stratego is a lot like battle ship, each player gets 40 pieces representing an individual officer/soldier in an army, along with bombs to take out ones opponent and one flag that you need to protect the entire game. When you choose to 'attack' your opponent your officer/soldier needs to be a higher rank than the one you are attacking in order to 'win' the battle. Who ever 'captures' or finds his opponents flag first wins the game.

After I explained the directions to the boys I told them to set up their pieces on the board, it was very interesting to me to see their strategies. William, probably mostly due to his age, only retained the part that he needed to protect his flag so he surrounded it with bombs and then just put his guys out in random order all over the board. Andrew apparently goes big or goes home. He placed all his high ranking guys at the very front of the board intending to wipe out all of William's guys from the very start. At the very beginning of the game Andrew's strategy seemed to be working and William was getting very discouraged, his entire battalion was nearly wiped out. Then when Andrew honed in on the clustered of bombs that was protecting William's flag all his top ranking guys got blown away. Allowing William to easily 'walk' over to the other side and capture Andrew's flag because Andrew only had Scouts (the lowest ranking soldier in the game) left to defend his flag. William ended up walking away with the win, but Andrew and I were able to spend a few minutes after the game talking strategy for the next time we play!