Could Stratego be played with more than two players?

There's a commercial variant of Stratego that apparently can be played with 3 or 4 players: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2978.

The trick with Stratego is that the value of your units is hidden from the other players. You need some clever piece design to accomplish this for a four player game. I don't know this variant of the game, so I don't know how well it plays in that regard.

I know that a predecessor of Stratego played with face down tiles, that would certainly work, although you have to think about whether players would be allowed to peek at their own units, or not. In the latter case you would introduce a memory element, which may or may not be desired.

Another option would be to play with all units revealed to all players. This would make it a more Chess-like game and it would remove an element of bluff, which I think is what makes Stratego fun in the first place.

Another possible problem with Stratego for more than 2 players could be that a "do nothing" strategy might be very effective: just hope other players wear each other down and then strike in for the win when your opponents have weakened each other enough. The mechanics will have to force players to engage in combat (as in LotR: Confrontation, pieces always have to move forward, so there will be combat at some point) or there has to be some kind of incentive to go to war (perhaps some kind of VP system where you win points based on how many enemy units you capture; obviously this wouldn't work with the "flag" mechanic of Stratego).

Just spitting out some ideas.

- René Wiersma