Top line for Perikles (M. Wallace, Warfrog/FFG, 2006, 3-5 pl, 180 min): Perhaps not the most original game ever, but still innovative & highly enjoyable. Has unexpected subtleties & respect for its theme. My rating: 7/10, possibly rising.

Historical Background
(Theme-phobes can skip this section!)

Martin Wallace (Age of Steam, Princes of the Renaissance, Struggle of Empires, &c) is a designer with some interest in theme. Often, quirky historical facts are buried deep within the structure of his games, making them the more unpredictable & colourful. Unlike many Germanic productions – better games perhaps – where irregularities are shaved off, to simplify, streamline, & at times polish a little too eagerly.

In comparison Perikles is messy. But it gets more out of its story.

& what a story this is! The final showdown in a period which, more than any other, embodies our modern notion of Ancient Greece: the golden age of Athens, 5 centuries BC. A time when philosophers like Zeno, Anaxagoras, & Socrates, playwrights like Aeschylus & Sophocles, artists like the legendary sculptor Phidias, are still living & breathing in Athens, often personal friends of each other, & of Perikles himself (c495-429 BC), Athens’s mighty democratic dictator. Even Athens’s landmark 2500 years later, the costly Parthenon temple on the Acropolis, is the work of Perikles & his age.

This very age of cultural & economic plenty is what the war in Wallace’s game – the Peloponnesian war 431-404 BC – puts to a brutal end. In a conflict between the 2 most important Greek city-states, Athens & Sparta, as unlike as day & night.

Athenians are round, comfort loving & somewhat volatile, democratically ruled (at least in principle), ever inventive, & their enormous naval superiority builds on a love of sailing, trade, & exploration. Spartans are strict (“spartan” without the capital s), ruled by the elite & by a monarch, & have little regard for other arts than warfare & the farming performed for them by their slaves. Athenians rule the sea with its many isles & coasts, Spartans rule the land of the Peloponnesian region. Little have the 2 peoples in common, save pride & lust to rule.

In the end this will benefit neither of them – not even Sparta, the war’s nominal victor. Other wars bestow large favours on the victorious part. This war appears to have tapped the inner vitality of both parties. Before long Greece, which few generations sooner stood united against a common foe, will be conquered by the Macedonian Philip. And given in heritage, as little more than a base for expansion, to Philip’s son Alexander the Great.

I hear objections: the golden century of Athens was not, by any means, the last breath to emerge from Greece. But my claim – or provocation - is that it’s nonetheless this highest of all peaks 5 centuries BC - & almost ONLY this – that has legitimated so many authorities when “branding up” ancient Greek culture. Without that century much of the case for classical Greece, as the heart of what many call “liberal” education, melts away.

Perhaps this is exactly what makes the Peloponnesian war relevant even today. Interesting & colourful enough, even, to make into a commercial Eurogame, rather than into a more historical, but also more conventional, wargame in, say, the GMT tradition.

Before moving to the game itself, I should mention one bitter pill: in the game all alliances are open in principle. Even Athens & Sparta may thus find themselves, for a while, played by the same player, acting as allies of sorts. Fortunately this is quite rare, usually short-lived, & apparently not that hot a strategy. Still, my efforts to find a prohibition in the rule book have failed.

It seems however to be the toughest pill, & may be dissolved by a house rule.



Game
The Board (click image above) depicts Athens, Sparta, & 4 other prominent city-states during the Peloponnesian war, yet the pattern is emphatically not 1 player-1 city. Any city is up for grabs by any player, & the game is about each player/family/faction gaining control of decisive cities, in order to exploit the military (infantry & warships) of these cities. This soldiery is of very varying strength from city to city, but correctly employed it will win military battles against other players, & thus Victory Points (VP). In addition, the very control of a city yields potential VPs.

The Game’s 3 political phases (“Gain control of the cities & of their military”), are in almost every way distinct from the military campaign phases (“Fight battles”), also 3 in number - 1 military campaign phase following each of the political phases. The political part is by far the most subtle: area influence in the best El Grande tradition, yet because the political victories here have military & very open-ended consequences, gameplay & tactics don’t quite remind me of anything I’ve seen before.

To be sure, each player has exactly equal opportunities for putting an exactly equal number of influence cubes in each of the most interesting cities. Yet because 1) that number of cubes remains very limited, 2) You can “assassinate” each other’s cubes (a delight), 3) It isn’t always the one with the most cubes who gains control of the city, & finally 4) cubes that did NOT take part in the electoral contest remain standing, until the next political phase, where they may give a new electoral victory to an entirely different player – all these reasons quickly make the political game rather hard to read. Add to this that the military battles (in which the cities, after elections, now engage their military) are selected partly at random, making it subject to much variation how interesting it is to control a given city in a given phase – suddenly we have a very interesting game of political-diplomatic intrigue, which should demand repeated games to master.

I write “political-diplomatic intrigue”, to stress once again that the military part is the poor cousin. Be warned that the 21 battles – 7 in each of the 3 military phases – are very stylised, both visually & with respect to the battle system. And yet it works, but only as the clear extension, or test in the field, of the political. Politics by other means.

Finally it should be mentioned that these 21 possible victories yield varying VPs – from 3 to 7 VP each, 4 being the most usual. These points do, in rough terms, correspond to the original significance of each battle or engagement. (The Sicily expedition, the collapse of which may alone have cost Athens the war, is thus worth a full 7 VP). Similarly, each city’s military & political status reflects realities at the time, WHILE making the game more tightly complex. It doesn’t get more Wallace than that. Athens & Sparta are of course the strongest in military terms – Athens being the dominant sea power - but politically, & in terms of pure VP, cities like Megara, & especially Corinth, are the happening places. (Megara was for long periods the central apple of discord, & without the deep hatred of the Corinthians for Athens, the war might never have begun.)

It is, in other words & just as in the original conflict, not least the difficult puzzle of alliances that wins the day. Put more precisely, you seldom win a campaign by controlling only 1 city, or by merely having a lot of troops. Conversely, power over too many cities – ie too many alliances - can weaken you too. Decisions, decisions.



Departures
Perikles has 2 key strengths:

1) It merges a humdrum military dimension with a political part that’s certainly more convincing, yet still not revolutionary. It is the sum of these 2 dimensions that makes the whole & the parts a great deal larger. It’s simply more fun, & more interesting in game terms, to try & conquer a city politically, in order to then dispose at whim & fancy of its troops.

2) It tempts the player to understand a war that may be forgotten, but which played a part in the evolution of the West impossible to overstate. Truly everything that young children – or college freshmen – learn about old Greeks & their bizarre culture – precisely the inner spirit of this is what the Peloponnesian war suffocated. Having said that, & as so often with historically themed Euros, we’re mostly dealing with what I call “2nd degree material” – it yields more curiosity, flavour & feel, than factual insight.

10 years ago I fought my way through the story of the Peloponnesian war by the classical Greek strategist Thucydides, only to wonder, at the end of the book, why this time-honoured historical authority had spent 1000 pages on a war nobody any longer remembered. This time round, I did some additional research – including a new plunge into Thucydides - & had to conclude that the Peloponnesian war was THE single disaster for classical Greece as we perceive it. It truly was a collective suicide. The instant the war stopped, Greece became a Mediterranean power like any other before or since.

Surely this is worth enacting & simulating in a well-conceived game!