Stratego Rules: How to Play, Step by Step

The Rules at a Glance

• Board: 10×10 squares, with two 2×2 lakes in the middle that no piece can enter.
• Army: 40 pieces per side, all ranks hidden from the opponent.
• Setup: pieces are placed at random, then you may swap any two of your own before the first move.
• Turn: move one piece one square up, down, left, or right. Scouts may move any distance in a straight line.
• Attack: step onto an enemy piece, both are revealed, the higher rank survives. Equal ranks both die.
• Win: capture the flag, or leave the opponent with no legal move.
• Draw: 800 moves in total (both sides combined) without a winner.

Everything below expands these seven lines.

The Board: 10×10 With Two Lakes

The battlefield is a ten-by-ten grid of squares, one hundred in total. Two lakes, each a 2×2 block of four squares, sit in the middle of the board. Lakes are impassable: no piece may enter a lake square, and no piece may move through one.

That short rule does most of the work in shaping the game. With the centre partly blocked, each army has to come at the other through a limited number of corridors, and the corridors are narrow enough that a single well-placed Bomb can shut one down. Ignoring the lakes is one of the fastest ways to lose — armies that crowd the middle find themselves queuing behind a wall instead of attacking.

You can always see where every piece on the board stands. What you cannot see is what the enemy pieces are, until they are revealed in an attack.

The Pieces: Ranks, Counts, and What Beats What

Each side has exactly forty pieces. The rank number decides attacks: the higher number wins. Bombs and the Flag have no rank at all.

Add the counts and you get forty: one plus one plus two plus three plus four plus four plus four plus five plus eight plus one plus six plus one.

Notice what the distribution implies. There are eight Scouts — by far the most common piece — and exactly one Marshal. Scouts are cheap, fast, and expendable; the Marshal is expensive, slow, and dangerous to reveal. A player who uses both the same way is playing half a game.

Setting Up: Random Placement and Free Swaps

Both armies are placed on the board at random at the start of a game. Your forty pieces land on your back four rows, and the opponent's forty land on theirs.

Random placement is the starting position, not the final one. Before your first move you may swap any two of your own pieces, as many times as you like — Bombs away from the front, the Flag into a corner, a Marshal behind a screen. Swapping is free and unlimited during setup; once you make your first move, the formation is locked.

You move first. That first-move advantage is small but real.

How a Turn Works

On your turn you move exactly one piece. A normal move is one square orthogonally — up, down, left, right. No diagonals, no jumping over a piece, no skipping your turn.

Three kinds of pieces do not follow that pattern:

• Scouts may move any number of empty squares in a straight line, horizontally or vertically. A Scout cannot jump over any piece, friendly or enemy, and it cannot turn a corner in a single move.
• Bombs cannot move at all. Once placed, a Bomb stays on its square for the whole game.
• The Flag cannot move either.

You cannot move onto a square occupied by one of your own pieces. You may move onto a square occupied by an enemy piece, and that is an attack.

How Attacks Work

Moving onto an enemy piece triggers an attack. Both pieces are revealed to both players at that moment, and the ranks decide the outcome:

• Higher rank wins. The attacking piece takes the square, the defender is removed from the board.
• Lower rank loses. The attacker is removed, the defender stays.
• Equal ranks. Both pieces are removed, and the square is left empty.

Every attack permanently reveals information, and that is often more important than the material swing. The moment your Colonel wins a fight, the opponent knows you have a Colonel and roughly where it is. Trading a strong piece for a weak one is sometimes the right move simply because it is the cheaper way to learn something.

Bombs, Sappers, and the Spy

Three pieces break the rank arithmetic, and all three are worth understanding before your first game.

Bombs. A Bomb has no rank. Any piece that attacks it is destroyed, whatever its number — a Marshal attacking a Bomb dies just like a Scout does. The one exception is the Sapper, rank 3, the only piece that can defuse a Bomb: when a Sapper attacks a Bomb, the Bomb is removed and the Sapper survives. Because Bombs never move, they are pure defensive furniture, and they are most useful sealing a corridor or guarding the Flag.

Sappers. Five per side, and their only special job is Bomb removal. Since Sappers are rank 3, they lose to most other pieces, so getting one to a Bomb can take several tries.

The Spy. One per side, rank 1, the weakest piece on the board — with one exception. When a Spy attacks a Marshal, the Spy wins and the Marshal is removed. The condition matters: it works on attack, not defence. A Marshal that attacks a Spy simply destroys it. Because there is only one Marshal, a Spy that is still alive and unidentified late in a game is a real threat, and a Marshal whose position is known is a liability.

The Repetition Rule

A piece may not shuttle back and forth between the same two squares a third time in a row. Moving a piece from A to B and then back from B to A is allowed; moving it from A to B a third time right after is not.

The rule exists to stop stalling. Without it, a player who is losing could shuffle one piece back and forth forever. With it, every game keeps moving toward an end.

How to Win — and How to Draw

There are two ways to win:

• Capture the Flag. Move any piece onto the square holding the enemy Flag.
• Leave the opponent with no legal move. If every piece the opponent has left is either immovable or blocked, the game is over.

There is one way to draw: if neither side has won after 800 moves in total, the game is scored as a draw.

The second win condition is the one beginners forget. A Flag surrounded by Bombs is safe from capture — until the player has nothing else that can move, at which point the solid fortress becomes the reason they lose.

A Short Worked Example

Say you open by pushing two Scouts up the left corridor. The first Scout meets a piece and dies. You have learned that whatever is there outranks a 2, which is not much, but you have also learned that the opponent is defending that side.

Your second Scout runs past and meets another piece, and this time the reveal shows a Bomb — the Scout is destroyed. Now the left corridor is closed to everything except a Sapper.

So you move the fight to the right, where a Captain has already traded with a Lieutenant and survived. The opponent has now seen a Captain on the right, which means their remaining heavy pieces are somewhere else, and you start to build a picture of where.

That is what a game looks like from the inside: not a plan executed, but a map of guesses getting slowly filled in.

Common Rules Questions

Can a Scout move and attack in the same move? Yes. A Scout may travel several squares and attack on the last square, as long as the path is clear.

Can a Bomb be attacked and survive? Yes, always, except against a Sapper. The attacker is destroyed in every other case.

Can the Spy defeat a General? No. The Spy only beats the Marshal, and only when attacking.

Can the Flag move to a safer square? No. The Flag never moves.

Can I move a piece back to where it came from? Yes, once. A third consecutive move across the same two squares is not allowed.

Does the computer see my hidden pieces? No. It only knows the pieces that have already been revealed in an attack.

Next Step

Once the rules are clear, the best way to learn is to play a game. Play a game of the browser version.