44 April 2019
L’ A T T A Q U E
the land, sea and sky action into a single
game, with coastlines and the opportunity for
units in di erent environments to interact.
While Dover Patrol, Aviation and Tri-Tactics
were based on Edan’s design for L’Attaque,
they were credited as being created by
Harry Gibson – who has been occasionally
miscredited with the design for L’Attaque, too.
L’Attaque continued to be produced in
London for almost two decades, until the
Gibsons site was destroyed during the Blitz
bombings during World War II.WAY TO STRATEGO
e story of L’Attaque would take another
signi cant turn toward the end of World War II.
While evading the Nazis in the Netherlands,
trader Jacques Johan Mogendor had come
up with the design for a game very similar to
Edan’s L’Attaque while playing with his sons.
According to historian Fred Horn, Mogendor ’s
design appears to have been inspired by a game
he had played called Te k, the creation of a shot-
down Canadian pilot sheltering in e Hague
in around 1941 to 1942. Te k itself seems to have
been based on the British rules of L’Attaque,
which the pilot may have played back home
and recalled from memory.
‘Stratego’ was rst registered as a trademark
in 1942, although who registered the name
is unknown. Two years later, Mogendor and
his family were deported to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp; they would be freed in
April 1945, though Mogendor ’s su ering in
the camp would contribute to his death in 1961. e rst edition of Stratego was published
in 1946 but, despite the game’s popularity,
Mogendor struggled nancially as the result
of the war and his inability to sell the game after
his original licence expired in 1949. In 1958, the
designer sold the rights to publisher Jumbo.
During the following year, Stratego sold more
than 15,000 copies across Europe. Its success
soon saw it cross the Atlantic to the US, where
the game shifted 100,000 copies in 1962 alone- ve years later it sold 300,000 copies in a year,
followed by its peak success in 1980 as over
700,000 copies were bought. In the decades
since, numerous versions have followed,
including a home computer release and
handheld video game for the Nintendo DS.
Stratego’s di erences to L’Attaque are slight.
e ten-by-ten board is more square, the players’
armies slightly in ated with 40 pieces each. Mines,
spies, sappers and the commander-in-chief (now
known as the general) all made a return. Later
variations would introduce more unique
roles and rules, ranging from the four-player
Ultimate Stratego to Stratego Fortress, which
added multi-storey 3D terrain and movement.
Although Stratego’s lineage to L’Attaque is
widely acknowledged, the complete destruction
of Gibsons’ company records in 1940 means
that even its creators remain somewhat in the
dark as to the exact relationship between the
two games. Mogendor is even alleged to have
called L’Attaque “an exact copy” of Stratego
upon seeing the earlier game, seemingly
unaware that Edan’s design predated his by
several decades.
“Stratego is clearly a variation of the same
game, but whether we just obtained the UK
rights and not world rights is unknown,” Michael
Gibson comments. “ ere would not appear to
be any evidence of any legal dispute between
ourselves and Jumbo, the publisher of Stratego.”BACK L’ATTAQUE
While Stratego has become a widely-known
competitive classic – the game has a dedicated
governing body, the International Stratego
Federation, that organises multiple championships
each year – L’Attaque isn’t nearly as well-known
among players. Its most recognisable version
from recent years may be Sharpe’s Attack, an
edition released by Gibsons in the mid-1990s
based on the Sean Bean-starring television series
that proclaimed itself as “developed from the
original game of L’Attaque” on the front of its box.
Despite being somewhat overshadowed in
the years since its release, Edan’s game has been
properly recognised as an important milestone in
the history of gaming, with the game appearing in
the collections of museums such as London’s V&A.
is May sees a re-release of L’Attaque with
a faithful recreation of the game’s original
box, components and rules sheet – although
an updated way of playing is also included.
Gibson expresses his hope that modern players
who pick up the game will nd more than a
historical artefact to appreciate.
“L’Attaque is a clever little game and, although
it passed out of fashion in the eighties, partly due
to the advent of computers, it still provides 60
minutes or so of stimulating entertainment.”