Stratego - Ranked Game #80 - Fairway v. Marcy_Regina_Wu

An absolutely brutal game featuring my opponent completely obliterating me. I considered not uploading this because it felt so brutal, but I ended up deciding that games like this could still be instructive even if I played really poorly. In trying to make sense of how this game went, there were a few things I thought of as the game "autopsy": -I didn't realize this as I was making the setup, but all of my captains and majors (alongside my gen and marshal) are in the front two rows. My colonels were buried, sure, but that's entirely too many mid-level pieces to have in the front two rows. Having colonels in the front two rows would've actually been better than burying them because colonels can defend my captains that might be revealed - but majors can't. So I accumulated way too much known material because they were all clustered around that area in my setup. Normally I rely on trading off, but Marcy didn't offer any trades, and I didn't know any material of his to even be able to trade either. It became too much and entirely overwhelming. -Normally I bury either my general or marshal (if not both), but I decided to do something different/new by having them both in the front two rows and being kind of apparent or "up front" with them. That may have worked well in a different setup construction, but with so many revealed majors and captains, my gen and marsh couldn't really play any other role than a legitimate defense role of those revealed pieces. That meant they were really hard to bluff and ended up becoming obvious. Marcy read them perfectly as a result. It felt like Marcy had the right piece every single time in every situation, and I think this is probably a big reason for that. -I miscounted pieces at the end and thought both of the pieces there on the backrow had to be movable if the piece I discovered on the left was a bomb (which it was). Much better, of course, would have been to keep running my general around and force him to find my flag. He had so many pieces that it was probably inevitable anyway, but this is a better option than taking the lotto chance, had I remembered correctly. Thanks for watching! Play Stratego here on strategus: https://strategus.appspot.com/play