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.

These photos are of several games that we played of "Commands and Colors: Ancients", a game that focuses on individual battles rather than whole wars. Here we're playing three scenarios from the Punic wars which A consistently won commanding the Romans. It's a relatively easy card driven game that A likes. If we ever find the time to turn it into a miniatures game it will be that much more fun to play.

Looks like Little K popped in for a look. Unfortunately, he's destroyed more than one of our games in progress.

To the delight of the kids, I have made playing board games a part of their home school curriculum. Each school day before lunch, A and I (and sometimes V with help) play a 30 minute session of a historically oriented board game. The idea is to have the kids involved in some way in the history that we're covering in class. V is too young at the moment to get a whole lot out of most of the games we're playing, but it's been a great success for A who is now old enough to play and appreciate pretty much all of the titles in my collection. Here we're playing our first completed game of "Hellenes" with A controlling the Peloponnesian League against my Delian League. This first game took almost two weeks to play in half hour increments which gave us a lot of time to go over the history and geography of the Peloponnesian war. We even did a little review of the Greek gods that are involved in a small way in the game. I ended up winning it largely because A confronted Athens directly rather than by first promoting revolts in my outlying allied city-states, as Sparta had done historically. In our second game, which lasted only two sessions, we played the same sides. Unfortunately for me, I raised taxes too early and A had four of my allied city-states in revolt by the end of the second year of play, ending up with a decisive victory - a good thing since he's happier that way. Way to go A!

This is a series of photos of some of my angled-pane traps being used to collect flying insects in Kenya and Tanzania in 2002. Angled-pane traps are of my own design and differ from standard pane traps in that the flight-intercept pane (made from plexiglass) is mounted close to a 45 degree angle to the vertical rather than being vertically mounted. The idea is that an angled pane improves the catch of faster flying insects - including the spheciform wasps that I study - compared with the catch of standard pane traps. Each trap includes a rectangular parasol that shades the base of the trap to decrease the amount of light reflected by the angled pane, thereby increasing trap effectiveness. The green fabric fences to the sides of the traps channel the insects toward the traps, often multiplying the catch considerably. Flying insects are deflected into soapy water contained by a plexiglass tray that forms the base of the trap.

The kids and I will design an experiment to compare the effectiveness of the angled-pane trap with a standard pane trap. It's already clear that the trap works very well and produces samples that differ significantly in faunal diversity compared with my own aerial netting done at the same time and place. For example, during a collecting trip to Kenya, a large series of females of a new species of Tachysphex were first collected with this trap in an area that Dr. Pulawski and I had already sampled with aerial nets.