Favorite board games

[Beorne]

Kristoffer O said:
Yesterday I was speaking with a friend regarding the use of boardgames to educate my students. I'll be teaching more history next year (after summer), and had an idea of using History of the World to get my students into the chronology of the world. Unfortunately the game seems to be out of print. I have the game, but I would prefer if the school could purchase, say four, games

Other games we discussed were Pax Britannica, Maharadja, Britannia, Repiublic of Rome and Diplomacy.

Of these I think HotW suits my needs best, but PB and M could be useful regarding colonial history and the the case of PB the motivations of states and the reasons behind the WW1.

Republic of Rome would probably be good for a few students, but a bit too deep for most of them. There is a lot of history hidden (or not hidden) in that game.

Other ideas?

I have all of them excluding Maradja, ad the best is absolutely RoR closely followed by Pax Britannica. Unfortunately these are old school AH games, with rules written in legalese and not too easy (but wery well developed) game mechanics. Setup isn't that easy too. I'm hoping FantasyFlight or some other republishes them. Britannia is very great if you want to teach Brit history to children, especially if you want to show how much you norsemen smashed the heads of britons. It has the advantage that has been republished by Fantasy Flight that has cleaned the rules and polished the graphics a lot.
Merchant of Venus is pretty, but there is almost no player interaction.
For games that mix conquest and diplomacy my thougts go to age of Thrones and Warrior Knigts, both published By FnatasyFlight, but you don't have historical settings.
GMT games has a lot of very well done conquest/diplomacy games that focus a lot on the historical details. All are very high quality product on a single period of european or american history, but they a are usually a little too complex.
But if you want historical settings, well there is no match, the old AH's Civilization is the absolute winner.

[Kristoffer O]

It turns out there is a mega-version of civilization, with up to 16 or 18 players or something, with adapted rules and additional map regions including the far east. We will check this out tomorrow. We will scan and make a couple of homemade HotW (unless we can find additional versions on ebay.

RoR is a great game, probably my favourite of the ones mentioned here. With five or six players it is a gem of a game. There was once a nice article in AH''s General magazine on 100 ways to loose in RoR. Nice way to show how much depth there was in the game.

As you say the rules are not easy and I think it would be more difficult for the students to understand the rules than the history behind the games

[Warhammer]

There is a reprint of Republic of Rome in the works, should be out in a few months. We play about once every 3-6 months and always get our tails beat. Gotta love the 1st and 2nd Punic Wars at the same time with both Hamilcar and Hannibal out.

Or the time we decided to take out the Punic Wars and as soon as I got Scipio out on the table, he dies...

[Gandalf Parker]

Does the reprint have a publisher?

I keep watch on my favorite games for remakes to try and steer them to a decent publisher. Too many think that their choices are only begging the big boys for crappy deals, or nothing.

[S.R. Krol]

Republic of Rome is being reprinted by Valley Games (http://www.valleygames.ca/), which is also reprinting a little game called Titan.