By: David Radd

For a long time, what people thought of board games occupied some casual realm of entities like Monopoly, Life, and Clue with war games being played by much more dedicated individuals, and in the middle the two halves rarely met. Splitting the difference, however, was Stratego, a classic strategy board game approachable by most people but complex enough to attract strategy buffs. Dennis Maas of Keesing Games is looking to bring the game to a larger, cross-platform audience online and he talked about his experience.

What drew you to do Stratego?

Well, there are a lot of good board titles out there: Risk, Monopoly, so on. It’s a bit of a coincidence, really. The license holder is based where we are [in the Neatherlands], and we talked to them about making this game. We discussed how to push it forward in a way that players can compete on a high level online.

You really have to make a connection between players. The strengths are people sitting around a table, joshing each other . . . and someone gets all the glory at the end. You’re playing against your friends or parents, and at a certain stage, you find out who is best. If you play someone else, it will suss out the same way.

Stratego is a good game to connect with the world. You will be matched with someone of your own strength – you don’t know them personally, but you won’t have the problem of getting to know them. Afterward, when you make their acquaintance, you can connect with them if you want and challenge them in the future rather than a random opponent. It’s not like visiting a friend’s farm and seeing how big your crops are. *laughs*

What attracts you to doing something that is essentially the new, digital family room?

It’s expanding. What we try to do now is listen to all users. We try to put out the bare minimum of what Stratego is. The core of the game is the friendship thing, being able to challenge other people you know. Now we’re looking to make that bigger, add in new features. Something we’re considering is planetary conquest mode or even a mode you play up the ranks regionally. Here in the Netherlands, when there’s a World Cup, offices make their own pool to see who is going to win — we’re thinking about it in that fashion. We’re trying to touch base with our user group of 200k players and see where they want to move. We wanted to bring out a good game first and from there on and go step by step — after all, it used to be played on a board exclusively and not on the internet.

You keep emphasizing getting the basic game right . . .

I was with a company that works with some of the Hasbro titles and you notice when the game acts differently in the digital environment. So we thought it was important to just take the game and recreate the experience as closely as possible.

That said, the digital environment allows you to do things the base Stratego game is not able to, like say allowing players to have custom games with their own selection of pieces.

That’s something we want to experiment with. What we were thinking of is letting the player choose 2 or 3 variant pieces, or maybe you can get more bombs. Ideas include a Spotter that would have a battle power to turn three pieces around, or maybe there’d be a Marine that can walk over the water. It’s a very delicate matter on how we do this without unbalancing the game – it’s a very delicate thing.

Tell me about the importance of coming to multiple platforms, like Facebook, iPad and the web.

We believe that if you make a family game, recreate the “around a table” atmosphere digitally, the place should not matter. Stratego is played by fathers and their sons – it’s a common combination. What we want is a father who is out on business but has an iPad to be able to spend some time with his son, who has a computer, playing Stratego. Key to that is cross platform. Each platform strengthens the other – it’s hard to reach critical match on iPad alone, but if you link them all together, you can hit a much bigger audience. A third thing is that it is easier to test things on web; if you want to test the game on iOS, you have to deal with a lot of issues. On the web you can roll it out easier. There are multiple good reasons to look at making a cross-platform game if you can.

Why do you feel like synchronous play is the new asynchronous play?

I think Stratego has too many moves to be made to be asynchronous. You have to pay too much attention to the game to go one piece at a time, drawn out maybe over days. While paying attention to the game, you have to think about the enemy, positioning of your marshal, etc. The best scenario in my mind is you’re either doing it with multiple games at one time or focusing on one game. I think with the complication of Stratego, I think it’s impossible to draw out one game like that; if you just focused on one game you’d have to wait a long time to see the conclusion

I think asynchronous works for some games, but a 40 on 40 piece game s would not be a good way to go with it. If we see users are looking for it, we might make a 10 on 10 game.

What sort of reception have you gotten to the beta so far?

Different feedback from different places. On the web, everyone loves it. There are a few country specific things. In Europe, you have different ratings you have to contend with on each of the different App Stores. It’s pissing us off because it costs us business!

A lot of the negative feedback we got, it’s when people are running around the board, trying to annoy the other. They also might be trying to avoid loss, taunting them. We’re trying to balance it — like after 10 moves you have to be in a fight. We have a price of $6.99 on iPad and on iPhone we’ll have $.99

Out of curiosity, if you were one Stratego piece, which would you choose?

The General, because the Marshal always has to look around for the Spy, while the General has the more straight forward role. The Marshal is more easy to recognize and is more likely to get taken down.

Anything to add in conclusion?

Again, in the future we’ll look to add battle powers. So we’re looking on how to expand the game and bring more elements of luck into it. We will experiment on it. A lot will happen in the coming months!

Dennis, thanks.