Stratego Setup Principles

 Making setups in Stratego is much simpler than you would think. One of the most important parts of creating a good setup is piece organization and abiding by strong principles. (Stratego players follow setup principles just like chess players follow opening principles.) Too often when we are setting up we fixate on unimportant pieces and don't creature a systematic structure in our setup. In this blog post I will attempt to outline what I learned from StrategoStrategy's book about opening strategy.

  Most new players start their setup by randomly grabbing pieces from the board and laying them out. This is a bad idea. When we just grab one piece and throw it on, the lack of organization often results in us losing track of the big picture. Instead, we should lay our pieces down by ranking. That is, first put down our 3's, then all of our 4s, then 5s and so on. Why should we do this? The answer is quite simple, one of the most important setup principles is  to evenly distribute our pieces across the left center and right of the board. By setting up our pieces in blocks we can  assure that they are evenly distributed. When we setup pieces randomly, making that assessment becomes much more challenging.
 Here are a list of the 5 most important setup strategies.

1. Place your most important pieces down first. Everything 6 and upward is very important. Although you can go down a 6 and still win the game becomes much more challening. If you go down a 7 then the game is practically over if your opponent plays systematically. 
2. Evening distribute your pieces. 
3. 9 and 10 should be near the front rows and should be closer to the center than the wings. (Your higher pieces must be close to the front and distributed evenly across the board. There's always the danger that your opponent will rush a marshal down one side of the board therefore it is important that your marshal or general are close by and can reach any side of the board in a timely manner. 
4. Don't stuff your scouts in the front row, many beginners make this mistake. (We don't want to do this because the only information we will learn about our opponent is where his bad pieces are located. Good players never  put anything higher than a 6 in their front row. The majority of the pieces in the front row are often 4s and 5s. Learning the location of a 5 is useless.
5. Bombs should always be kept out of the front row. Good players wont attack your front row pieces with good pieces. If they figure out where one of your bombs is early in exchange for a 4 or 5 it is very advantageous for them. Additionally, having a bomb in your front row really reduces mobility. That being said don't put your bombs in the front row and most likely not in the second row.
6.  Flag should always be in back-row and always be guarded by bombs. If you play systematically it makes it impossible for your opponent to just win the game by luck.

Thanks for reading. I'm relatively new to Stratego but I find writing about it helps me articulate my thoughts about it. Hope this helps you reader and be sure to check out the link I posted above. It is a great resource for Stratego information.

Nick