@oztea:
And you move the papers around the board, but the units stay on the sidelines.
Man this is so hard to explain……4:00 AM after a long day of work.
I understand the concept you’re describing because I’ve experimented with something similar. The equipment I use consists of:
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Coloured wooden blocks from the “Commands & Colors: Ancients” series by GMT games, or similar games (I have about twelve different colours)
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Mini poker chips from A&A
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Small Avery-type self-adhesive dots in various colours, which I applied to one side of the poker chips
Here’s a simple example (with a very small number of units) of how this works. Let’s imagine that we want to represent three different German armies at different points along the Russian border – one big, one intermediate-sized and one small – and that we want to conceal information from the Russian player about which army is which.
The sculpts representing the three armies are set up on a side table, in three groups. Next to each army, we put a black wooden block (black being Germany’s A&A colour). On top of one block, we put a modified mini poker chip with its coloured dot facing up – let’s say, a chip with a red dot. The second army’s block gets, let’s say, a blue-dot chip, and the third one gets a yellow-dot chip. (The dot colour choices are arbitrary; they have no significance, except for identification purposes. An upscale variation of this same idea would be to use HBG’s special unit markers: http://www.historicalboardgaming.com/German-Special-Units_c_186.html).
Now we go to the game map. The German player puts down three black blocks (representing the three armies) at the desired locations. He then takes three poker chips (one with a red dot, one with a blue dot and one with a yellow dot) and puts them on top of the blocks with the dotted side facing down. Each block on the map therefore now corresponds (based on its dot colour) to the three armies on the side table, but the German player is the only one who knows which army on the board reprsents which army on the table because the Russian player can’t see the dot colours on the board. It’s only when a Russian army makes contact with one of the German blocks that its chip gets turned over to reveal its identity (which is where the Stratego parallel comes in).