A kitchen-table game, a wartime registration and a licence.

A detailed record of Stratego’s early years comes from an American courtroom. In an opinion dated 18 November 2005, the US District Court for the District of Oregon summarised sworn declarations about the game’s origins in a copyright case brought against Hasbro and its subsidiary Milton Bradley; the court granted Hasbro’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed the claim. According to those declarations, the Dutchman Jacques Johan Mogendorff developed Stratego in the Netherlands, and his family understood that he worked it out at the kitchen table with his two sons.

The name was protected as a trademark during the war. A Dutch collector told the court he had seen the 20 April 1942 Netherlands registration of the mark “Stratego,” held by the Dutch company Van Perlestein & Roeper Bosch. The company’s records, as described to the court, include a 1962 letter from Mogendorff’s lawyer explaining that the 1942 registration had been made in that company’s name as a result of the German occupation; Hausemann and Hötte’s product-development department told the court this meant that Mogendorff, as a Jew, could not register the mark in his own name. The court record says Mogendorff and his family were deported in 1943 and liberated in April 1945.

Production followed the war. The declarations say Mogendorff licensed the game to the Dutch printing company Smeets and Schippers between 1946 and 1951, and collectors date their surviving copies of that edition to 1946, 1947 and 1948, using paper-rationing numbers and the pre-1947 Dutch spelling in the rules. Jumbo, in a history it published for an anniversary in 2008, says the Smeets and Schippers version was not a success, and suggests one reason: its cardboard playing pieces could be recognised from behind, when the whole game depends on hiding each piece’s rank from the opponent.

The name itself, English Wikipedia says, comes from the Greek strategos, a general. It belongs to a family of hidden-rank war games: the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds a 1970s copy of the British game L’Attaque, describes that game as “exactly the same as Stratego, which was a later adaptation,” and English Wikipedia traces L’Attaque to a French patent filed by Hermance Edan in 1908.

Hausemann and Hötte, Milton Bradley and Jumbo.

The turning point came in 1958. The court record says the Dutch games company Hausemann and Hötte obtained a licence for Stratego from Mogendorff covering Europe in 1958 and the rest of the world in 1959; Jumbo, the brand under which that company traded, dates the European licence agreement to 10 June 1958. Jumbo says its own edition was successful from the start, with playing pieces made of wood.

America followed through a sublicence. According to the court record, Hausemann and Hötte sublicensed the game to Milton Bradley in 1961, and Milton Bradley — and Hasbro, after it acquired Milton Bradley in 1984 — went on making and selling Stratego under that agreement. Milton Bradley registered copyrights in the game’s cover, board, directions and cover label, and the earliest applications give its US publication date as 17 February 1961. Its 1961 catalogue introduced Stratego as “the American version of the game now popular in Europe.”

Ownership of the name then moved to the Dutch licensee. The court record says that after Mogendorff died in 1961, Hausemann and Hötte bought the copyright in Stratego, and the United States trademark he had applied for in 1958, from his heirs. Jumbo’s own account dates the agreement transferring all rights in the Stratego mark to the company to 26 June 1962. English Wikipedia says Hausemann and Hötte was succeeded in 2009 by Koninklijke Jumbo B.V., and that the name has been licensed to manufacturers and retailers in the United States.

Today the Jumbo Group says it is “the minds behind” Stratego, alongside games such as Party & Co and Hitster, and describes itself as a union of companies including Koninklijke Jumbo in the Netherlands, Diset in Spain and James Galt in the United Kingdom. The stratego.com address now forwards to an online version of the game.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

Two armies, hidden ranks and Napoleonic dress.

Stratego’s design starts with concealment. Each player sets out an army of pieces whose ranks face only their owner, and English Wikipedia says the pieces carry Napoleonic insignia, in two armies coloured red and blue. Jumbo, in its 2008 history, says the theme is loosely based on Napoleon’s wars rather than on any single battlefield, although an edition issued in the mid-1980s printed a map of Austerlitz on the board. In 2015, English Wikipedia says, Jumbo published Stratego Waterloo for the bicentenary of the battle, replacing ranks with historical units.

The pieces themselves have changed with the materials of each era. English Wikipedia says early pieces were printed cardboard set in metal clip stands, painted wood became standard after the Second World War, and plastic took over from the early 1960s; the plastic pieces were given a small base, so they were less likely to tip over and reveal their rank. It says European editions introduced cylindrical, castle-shaped pieces, while later American editions used rectangular pieces with coloured stickers, and that the American and European versions long numbered the ranks in opposite directions.

The game sits beside an older British cousin with a visual history of its own. Gibsons, the London games company that published L’Attaque in Britain, said in February 2019 that it had printed and made the game at its premises in Aldersgate Street from the early 1920s until 1940, when the building was destroyed in the Blitz, and that it had released an anniversary edition with box artwork redesigned to mimic an early version. The V&A’s copy, made in England in the 1970s, carries the title in bold type on a red background.

For a design guide, Stratego shows how a game name registered in wartime can travel through licences, a sale and several owners while keeping its red and blue armies and its Napoleonic dress. Compare Jumbo, the Dutch company that owns the name, and Risk, the world-conquest game published in America two years earlier. For this guide we use army blue, army red and field cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Stratego’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.