New Site dedicated to Stratego Strategy

[StrategoStrats]

Hey guys!

I saw that Slitherine recently decided to make a version of the classic game Stratego so I thought I'd share my website on here.

My friend and I are working to grow the Stratego community so we put together a new website that teaches the basics and helps a player learn what they need to get better.

We were hoping that those of you from Slitherine who use to play the game might check out our site and give us feedback on what we can do better. Here is a short excerpt from our site. Let us know what you think.

For the full article with picture diagrams check out http://strategotips.com

Board game memory

Board memory is the ability to remember all moved and unmoved pieces on the board, as well as the identities of any pieces which have been discovered. Board memory is of the utmost importance to Stratego strategy, as we have seen in the previous chapters.

When playing Stratego, it is of the utmost importance that you remember every piece the opponent has moved, and the identities of your opponent’s pieces. It is also important to remember which pieces you have moved, so that you have an understanding of what your opponent knows.

Each player begins with forty pieces, so that makes for up to potentially eighty pieces of information. How is a player supposed to remember all this?

Adrianus Dingeman de Groot (1914-2006) was a Dutch psychologist and chess master, and his studies on chess players—conducted in the 40s, 50s, and 60s—showed that a master chess player is—
able to reconstruct from memory an entire chess position he has seen for the very first time in just a matter of seconds, whereas an amateur player is entirely incapable of doing so.

However, there was one caveat: the chess positions being committed to memory had to be one from real games (or at least “normal-looking” positions), not random ones.

When the pieces were scrambled in an entirely random fashion, the strong chess players did no better than the weaker ones in reconstructing the positions from memory.

Thus, de Groot established his theory of “chunking.” His idea was that chess players group pieces they see into “chunks” of information. So instead of remembering where all thirty-two chess pieces were at any one time, the professional chess players only had to remember about five to seven “core” groups of pieces.

This fits with what we believe today about the human working memory, namely, that it is able to hold between five and nine pieces of information at any one time (see “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” by George A. Miller).

In the same way, it is possible in Stratego to group pieces into different formations and thus to remember which ones have moved.