Stratego

Very few boardgames spawn their own World Cup, Olympiad, Ryder Cup or, indeed, a Robot Championship. Even fewer games have British world number ones – step forward Richard Ratcliffe. Stratego has all of these and is now on the DS. So what's not to love?

Er, we'll come to that in a minute. Let's accentuate the positive part first.

Stratego, for those of you not in the know, is a kind of variant of dark chess. Two players move their red (or blue) pieces around a 10x10 board, the aim being to find and capture their opponent's flag. Like chess, each of a player's 40 pieces have various ranks so that, for example, a Marshall beats a Major and a Lieutenant beats a Scout. Unlike chess there are two kinds of pieces – bombs and the flag – which do not move. And also unlike chess there are two 4x4 squares in the middle of the board that no piece can enter.

Even more unlike traditional chess – perhaps that comparison wasn't so apt – players cannot see the rank of their opponent's pieces. Thus, you might laughably attempt to take your opponent's General with a Sergeant, the equivalent of taking on Lewis Hamilton with a bicycle, because the only way to find out what your opponent's pieces are is by attempting to take them. And to add a further layer of intrigue, or confusion, only the humble Miner can defuse bombs and only the game's lowliest piece – and solitary female character, feminism fans – can kill the most powerful.

Stratego didn't get a sizeable worldwide playing community by not being a brilliant game. Having said that, a lot of what makes Stratego great is the stuff you do before you start playing. Basically, how you choose to lay out your 40 pieces determines how the game will unfold. You can be boring (boo!) and surround your flag with bombs and big hitters, or you can be audacious (yay!) and stick your flag at the front of your formation on the grounds that it's so obvious and foolhardy that your opponent would never look there. This being a videogame version, Ubisoft have understandably kept one eye on Stratego newbies, and the game comes with more than 20 preset formations which in theory allow you to learn the ropes at your leisure.

What DS owners might want to know, though, is why they should spend £20 on the DS version of Stratego, rather than the boardgame (£18) or the PC iteration (£10)?

On the pro side Stratego DS comes with some rather terrific marching and military music that is dramatically punctuated by random explosions. The occasional gunshots made my dog dive under the bed. On the minus side, there's pretty much everything else. As a one-player game this is a savagely limited cart that it's difficult to recommend as you're restricted to playing one-off matches against the computer. True, there are three difficulty settings, but playing on 'hard' from the start I won eight of my first ten games.

Equally true is that there are three versions of the game on offer, Stratego, Stratego 90 and Stratego Duel. Stratego 90 is the original game with the board tilted at 90 degrees, while Stratego Duel is the original game played with only ten pieces.

But I won both of those easily too. Yes, Stratego's fun for a ten minute blast on the tube as it is, but for the life of me I can't understand why a one-player tournament option wasn't included. Compare Stratego with, say, Advance Wars: Dark Conflict for longetivity, or compulsiveness, and you can do little but stare at the floor, look sheepish and begin mumbling to yourself. On a bad day I would say it was on a level with Minesweeper.

The two-player game is much better, though as single cart multiplay is restricted to the ten-a-side 'Duel' Stratego you and a friend could shell out for the boardgame and still have enough left over for a bottle of Pepsi Max, some Vienetta and a romantic dinner for two at Wimpey. You get the point.

Perhaps because of stringent licensing issues, Stratego DS is little more than a simulation of the board game. It's a quite brilliant game, but with weak AI and limited scope in one-player mode, it's a questionable handheld purchase. Unless you're looking for a my-first-Stratego primer and just happen to own a DS, wait until it hits the bargain bins. You won't have long to wait.