Plateau is an unusual game. At first glance, Plateau looks like a typical abstract strategy game for two players; but looks can be deceiving. Underneath this veneer lies a deeply psychological game of bluffing which makes it quite unlike other games.
Plateau is played on a four by four checkerboard, with white and black checkers used by the two respective players. Each checker has a colored disc attached to it, which determines its style of movement (orthogonal, diagonal, or knight's move). Players take turns deploying checkers onto the board, or moving a pile of their checkers according to the movement style of the checker on top of the pile. The goal is to be the first to form a stack of checkers at least six high, or capture six of your opponent's pieces. Sounds typical, right?
Well here's the catch: the checkers may actually have colored discs on both sides, and before moving, a player is entitled to flip over the top checker of a pile, and move according to the movement style of the newly exposed color indicator. Checkers that have no visible colored disc may move in any direction, but cannot capture an opponent. Plateau is not a game of perfect information, making it decidedly different from other strategy games. You may think you are safe when, surprise!, your opponent flips over a checker revealing a movement ability that allows him to capture your most precious stack.
It is impossible to reason fully about the state of the game when the identity of most of the pieces is unknown. The best you can do is make educated guesses about what the other player might be trying to do based on his or her personality, and play strategically based on these likelihoods. For purists, this will be extremely frustrating. On the other hand, perhaps this element of bluffing is exactly the spice you need to heighten your interest in abstract strategy. There's a good chance that you'll enjoy Plateau if you like Stratego, a popular strategy game that also doesn't have perfect information.
Where the game really falls apart for me is the complexity of the rules. Many strategy games advertise with the slogan "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master." To me, this is truly the ideal that strategy games should strive for. If there exist games that can offer a lifetime of enjoyment with rules that can be summed up in one or two sentences, why should I ever settle for anything less elegant? Unfortunately, Plateau is more like "fifteen minutes to learn, and keep the rulebook handy."
To be fair, most of the rules are relatively straightforward. Once you memorize which colors correspond to which movement styles, and learn the rules for deploying and moving, you're halfway there. The game offers a unique way to "pin" pieces, without actually capturing them, but this concept isn't too hard to grasp. The real culprit is the rule about exchanging pieces. On any turn, you can offer up for trade any of the opponent's pieces that you've captured. The other player must give you back your own captured pieces, of equal value or as close as he can come. Each piece, depending on its combination of colored discs on either side of the checker, has an arbitrary trading value between 1 and 22 that must be looked up in the rulebook. These values can't reasonably be memorized, so the game bogs down whenever one person offers captured pieces for trade (this happens several times per game). A lot of time is spent cross-referencing the trade values of all the captured pieces to compute the optimal subset that should be offered to get a favorable trade in return.
Maybe the complexity of the rules will be worth it to you if you find this unique combination of psychology and tactics to be appealing. But as for me, I'll stick with the strategy games in my collection that I can play without keeping the rulebook handy.
A computer version can be downloaded from the Plateau web site. If you beat the computer, you can buy a physical set for $15 instead of $20.