ANCIENT GREEK HISTORY

Here are the two games that we're using to cover early Greek history, "Hellenes" and "Perikles", along with Donald Kagan's absolutely fantastic "The Peloponnesian War" and the DK title on Ancient Greece. Once you pick up Kagan's book, you will not put it down. I also have had the kids watch some documentaries from the History Channel on Ancient Greece, including an excellent three parter on the history of Sparta which they enjoyed (having previously only seen "300" and "Meet the Spartans"!). PBS has it's own excellent, well produced three-hour documentary on ancient Sparta with wonderful views of artifacts and the locales discussed.

Both Hellenes and Perikles center around the Peloponnesian war, but are completely different. Hellenes is a 2-player card-driven wargame that largely focuses on units on the map (which is attractively illustrated on the gameboard). The units are colored wooden blocks whose identities and strengths are hidden from the opponent (see an earlier post for a photo of the game in play). The basic mechanics are largely straightforward, but some time needs to be spent playing in order to gain enough familiarity with the game that it starts to have some flow. A and I have played the first scenario (431) completely two times and have found it quite challenging for the Athenian player to stay on top of things. Maybe the Athenians should stay away from raising taxes. I think the designers did a good job creating a relatively simple game that manages to place the players in a strategic situation that has the flavor of the one that Kagan describes. It's fun when the game parallels parts of actual history. At one point, for example, the Athenian player invaded Pylos in hopes of drawing some Peloponnesian units away from Attica, which, as it turned out, is what the Greek general Demosthenes did in real life.

In contrast to Hellenes, Perikles is a much more abstracted game which centers around a political system for gaining temporary control of the six Greek city-states represented (or, failing that, the Persian forces). It's for 3-5 players and A and I have played it a few times with K.