The 40 Most Popular Board Games, According to Ranker – Part Seven

Number 10: Stratego
2218 Positive Votes
1611 Negative Votes
Often Listed

Two armies engage in a field of hidden value.  Units slam into enemy ranks, hoping to flush out troops led by lesser officers.  All units, however, must maneuver cautiously.  Reckless charging exposes officers to be overwhelmed by their superiors.  Even the Marshall, who remains at the top of the chain of command, is a misstep away from dismemberment by a hidden land mine, or disembowelment at the hands of a Spy.  If you read the moves of your enemy, finesse your army to manipulate your opponent’s, and capture the flag, you can be a conqueror in the game of Stratego.

Stratego was designed by Jacques Johan Mogendorff in 1947, though it stole significantly from the game L’attaque, by Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, whose game was first published in 1910 (You can see the patent, in French, right here.)  The few differences between the two games appear to be:

1. The number of each type of unit (for example, L’attaque features four ‘Mines’ and four ‘Sapeurs’, while Stratego features six ‘Bombs’ and five ‘Miners’.)
2. L’attaque places three lakes in the center of the board, creating four choke points.  Stratego features two lakes, for three choke points.
3. L’attaque was printed with units wearing (then) modern military uniforms, while traditional Stratego features a Napoleonic warfare theme.

I guess I really enjoy stealing pictures from the Museum of Play, eh?

But if we want to get at the root of this game, we can’t stop with L’attaque.  There’s no proof that Mademoiselle Edan lifted the idea of her game from the Chinese game Jungle, but the similarities are striking.

Image pulled from Ancientchess.com

In Dou Sho Qi, players manipulate a small kingdom of animals.  The first player to slip one of their animals inside their opponent’s den wins the game.  Each animal is assigned a value, starting with the most powerful, the elephant, leading all the way down to the least powerful, the rat.  What rats lacks in power, however, they make up in sneakiness.  Unlike the other animals, the rat can swim in the water, is too small to be stepped on by the elephant, and is somehow capable of destroying the elephant.  I presume through blackmail.  Elephant spouses never forget.

If Mademoisselle Edan used Jungle to create L’attaqe, she did so making a number of significant changes.  In Jungle, all the pieces are known, and begin at a starting location.  Lions and Tigers are allowed to leap across the ‘river’ tiles in Jungle.  Traps don’t automatically kill an animal (and no unit disarms a trap.)  Instead, if an animal stops in a trap, it can be eaten by any other animal.

And then there’s Luzhanqi, or ‘Land Battle Chess’:

Unlike Jungle, Luzanqi features pieces with hidden information (an interesting quirk of Luzanqi is that it requires a referee to play.  That’s because when a piece attacks another piece, the referee looks at both pieces, and returns the winner to the board in its hidden state.  In this way, Luzanqi is more similar to Electronic Stratego, which lets the computer act as judge.)   Luzanqi includes a number of elements similar to L’attaque, including nine units of increasing rank, bombs to disarm using sappers, and a flag to capture.

The problem with deciding that L’attaque is a descendant of either of these games, though, is that we don’t know how old Luzanqi and Jungle are.  A number of the rules for Chinese games are passed down to us via word of mouth. ‘Children’s games’ like Luzanqi and Jungle weren’t considered important enough to mention in official records.  Furthermore, Luzanqi makes a distinction between ‘bombs’ and ‘mines’, and ‘roads’ and ‘railroads’, which makes it sound like a relatively recent invention.

River choke points are a common theme in many Chinese games.  But it’s possible that Mademoiselle Edan either invented the same idea through luck, or learned about other Chinese games that included the choke points and employed them in L’attaque.  It’s possible that L’attaque came first, was introduced to China, and influenced both of these games.  Or perhaps someone knew the rules for L’attaque, discovered an old Chinese game with similar pieces, and adapted the new rules to the old board, inventing a new game out of old parts.  Or maybe there’s a missing link—an older fourth game that influenced the other three games.  We may never know.

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Number 9: Trivial Pursuit
2286 Positive Votes
2531 Negative Votes
Often listed and High on Re-Ranks

Players walk their pies around a board and answer trivia.  A six Qs at six bases for six different categories and win the game.

It’s one of the simplest ideas in gaming.  Anyone with some time and a little reason could have printed it.  Any company could have published it.  But when Chris Haney and Scott Abbott created the game, they couldn’t sell it to a publisher.  Nobody wanted it.

The problem was there was no perceived market for adult board games.  In the late 70s and early 80s, Toys ‘R’ Us dominance of the toy and game market made it a category killer.    Its massive, warehouse-like inventory provided a gigantic library that crushed the competition in the brick and mortar toy and hobby market.  As the company continued to dominate and spread, its warehouse-like shelving meant that otherwise unknown manufacturers could share shelf space next to big name products… but only if they were willing to agree to whatever demands Toys ‘R’ Us made.  These hardball tactics with manufacturers resulted in consistently low prices, which large department stores couldn’t compete with.  Consequently, department stores scaled back their toy and game departments, further entrenching the giraffe’s dominance.  Working with Toys ‘R’ Us made or broke you.  Sometimes it did both.

My name is Ozymandius! King of Kings! Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!

This, by the way, is one of (a number of) reasons the Sega Master System was left in the dust by the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States.  Sega wouldn’t play Toys ‘R’ Us games.  Consequently, Toys ‘R’ Us prioritized Nintendo every chance it could get.  You can point to any number of reasons why the NES might be a better system than the SMS.  But it’s interesting to note that the SMS was competitive with the NES in Europe.  The first international Toys ‘R’ Us store was erected in 1984… in Canada.  You can draw your own conclusions, but if the situation was reversed and the NES library wasn’t in stock on Toys ‘R’ Us shelves, we might be playing Out Run Kart and Super Alex Kidd Maker.

…and the Smash Brothers franchise would become an arm-wrestling simulator, due to the surprising butterfly effect that made the Over the Top franchise a global phenomenon. I believe I went too far.  (Image cropped from Marcel Borges’ work.)

It’s in this environment that Haney and Abbott were shilling their game.  It was a world where board games were all but gone from the shelves of Sears and Woolworths.  If you wanted to make money, you needed to do it at Toys ‘R’ Us.  And Toys ‘R’ Us did not sell products for adults.  That was a store for kids.

But Haney and Abbot were confident in their game even if the publishers weren’t.  So they dumped their savings, and buried themselves in debt printing copies.  1,100 proto-types were made, and whenever one sold, they lost $60.  Initial demand for orders after the game’s debut at the 1981 American International Toy Fair in New York City were disappointing, with only a few hundred orders to show.  Even with Haney and Abbot absorbing much of the game’s cost, game store owners were skeptical of a trivia game that cost their customers $30 (at the time, an exorbitant price.)  Why pay so much for a trivia game when you can buy a big book of trivia for $1.99?

But the public was starved for adult party games.  They didn’t just buy Trivial Pursuit, they raved about it.  Previously lukewarm store owners centupled their orders.  Trivial Pursuit was a runaway hit, raking in twenty million dollars worth of sales in 1984 alone.  Toys ‘R’ Us packed its shelves with the game and its ever increasing line of expansions (five bonus card sets by ’84.)  Major game companies kicked themselves for ignoring an entire market of gamers, and the adult party game boom begun.  The industry turned on its head thanks to a couple of designers who admitted in a court of law to stealing a large number of their questions from trivia books.

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Number 8: Battleship
2653 Positive Votes
2616 Negative Votes

Here’s a quick tip for those of you thinking of buying a copy of Battleship, but aren’t sure if it’s worth your hard earned twelve bucks.  Grab a pencil, tear a sheet of paper in two, give one half to another player and play (you can find the rules here.)  Hasbro didn’t invent the game.  The only thing Ed Hutchins did for Milton Bradley in 1967 was redesign a classic pencil and paper game made popular by bored soldiers in World War I, and eventually printed by the Starex company under the name Salvo in 1931.

“You sunk my big-ish ship!”

As a kid vacationing with my parents on the Mohawk Trail, I played quite a few games of ‘Fleet‘ between myself and the Yes & Know book series, in which hits and misses are revealed by highlighting squares with a ‘magic marker’.

Suddenly I have an urge to play with He-Man action figures while the song “These Dreams” plays over the radio.

Hasbro can’t defend themselves from companies who want to create their own version of Battleship.  They can only pester them legally if those companies choose to use peg and plastic suitcases similar to their design.  Since the pen and paper version of the same game is a cultural artifact with no known designer, it now rests well within the public domain.  That’s why you can find eighty-eight different versions of Battleship with alternate names over at the BoardGameGeek (My favorites are “Aqua ¡Boom!”, “Flottenmanöver”, and “Touché-Coulé”.)

Don’t feel bad for the Hassenfeld Brothers.  Brand recognition goes a long way.  The Battleship movie alone netted $83 million dollars.  As ‘research’ for this article, I watched that stupid movie despite its 34% Rotten Tomato meter rating.  It was better than I expected.  It’s far from great.  But the way people talk, I expected it to be miserable lump.  Instead it was an occasionally entertaining lump.

It was easy to imagine, though, that the director didn’t know what his movie was based on, or even what the title of his movie was.  For the first hour and a half, we don’t see a battleship set sail (just cruisers.)  And the initial encounter between the alien ships and the cruisers play more like Stratego, with ships forcing themselves onto each other blindly.

The movie doesn’t become Battleship until much later, when a ship’s radar goes down and the crew is forced to use satellite communication with a local buoy network to determine where the alien ships are.  Up goes a grid of buoys on the overhead, and the commander calls out commands like “Foxtrot Seven! Romeo Three!  Fire!”  Thankfully the entire movie isn’t that.  For every person who complained about how the movie wasn’t similar enough to the original property: please, stop for a minute and think of what you’re requesting.  Movies aren’t games.  Maybe that’s a reason not to make a Battleship movie in the first place, but this is the world we live in.  Battleship is a movie.  Be thankful we weren’t forced to watch Liam Neeson and Rihanna play the board game equivalent of hide-and-go-seek for two hours.

I mean, did you really want the movie poster to look more like this?

The movie was a miss.  But the makers of Battleship know that if you fire enough missiles, you’re bound to hit something.   Hopefully, Hasbro and Hollywood will take what they learned from this miss-fire, and adjust their trajectory in time for the Monopoly movie’s debut.