Stratego

Along with Monopoly and Cluedo, Stratego is one of those classic family board games with which we were tortured as kids. Putting dark memories of being made to play Monopoly until dad had forced us into mortgage hell to one side, we remember Stratego as the game where you have an army lined up on either side of a gridded playing field. Amongst the 40 playing pieces on each side you have a Marshal, bombs, a spy, miners, and various ranks of military officer. Ringing any bells yet?

The game's objective is to capture the other player's flag, which is nestled somewhere amongst the massed ranks of your army. In fact, a significant part of the gameplay is setting up your pieces ready for battle (another boredom-torture favourite among dads, we recall), and mobile Stratego caters for this pretty well. A selection of preset layouts is offered, and once you've chosen one you can move pieces around within it.

Although you can save a Battle game at any point to restart it later on, itchy fingers also get a 'Duel' mode that throws you into war with just ten pieces to deal with, as well as a restricted range of piece types. This proves a good addition for mobiles, as you're able to dip in to have a quick, bus ride-long game.

According to good ol' Wikipedia, Stratego first arrived in the west in 1961 but actually has its roots in an ancient Chinese game called Dou Shou Qi ('Game of the Fighting Animals'). In today's world, the mobile version of Stratego has similarly illustrious roots, having been developed by Lunagames, the company behind the Pocket Gamer Gold Award-winning Air Traffic Controller 2007.

But despite such a strong credentials, we found mobile Stratego a little too raw for our taste. There are a lot of missed opportunities in the game's information systems. For instance, going to the piece 'graveyard' doesn't show you the rank of the decimated pieces, but rather just the indistinguishable graphics of the characters' heads. And it took us more than a few moments to realise that the reason we couldn't move some pieces forward was because they were placed up against a blurry puddle of water.

In fact, it seems as though pretty much all chances to pep-up Stratego with brighter, more interesting visuals (such as adding battle animations between the pieces) have been ducked. Even allowing for the pieces being square and moving around on a grid, this is a pretty boring looking game.

What isn't boring is the inclusion of a head-to-head Bluetooth multiplayer mode, which is an all too rare addition to mobile games and a great feature to offer. Of course, you need a version of the game on two mobiles in order to play – sadly, there's no Nintendo DS-style wireless gamesharing here – and only you can tell how likely that is amongst your chums.

All things considered, we doubt Stratego on mobile is going to inspire anyone to hunt through their parent's attics in search of the original board game. For dedicated fans, though, this version should pass muster.