Good evening. You are listening to Throne Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakeney. Here with me

tonight is 3MA founder, Troy Goodfellow. Hello, hello. And once again, we have our elite

irregular panelist, Bruce Garrick. Hello gamers. So Bruce is our host just over a week ago

when we got into all kinds of board games. You've already heard

our show on the works of auction master, Reiner Kenezia, and if you haven't, go give it a listen.

But tonight, we're back to discuss Mark Herman's Pericles, a game that first puzzled me and then

delighted me with its clever treatment of a generations-long great power conflict in 5th century BC, Greece.

Troy, one of the first things that jumped out at me here is that while the game's name for Pericles,

the Athenian statesman who led Athens into the Peloponnesian War, that the historian Thucydides

documented, the game itself seems to take a much more modern view of when the actual conflict between Sparta and Athens began, the distinct phases that it went through, and what the major strategic factors were.

Can you set the historical table a little bit for us here?

Well, now historians tend to think of the Peloponnesian War, not just the great Peloponnesian War, which began in 4.31 or something.

About 30 years earlier, shortly after the defeat of the Persians by the Greek Alliance, there's what's called the First Peloponnesian war, which was provoked by

not just Athenian and Spartan rivalry, but by just a number of things going on within the

nations. The Spartan slaves revolted, and then when the Athenians went to help put down

the revolt, Sparta didn't trust Athens.

There were all of these insults going on. And that was one of these wars that Athens proved

to be much more powerful on land than expected, as well as having its strong navy. It allied with

Argos in Sparta to help try to restrict Spartan movement. But that war

dragged on for about 15 years, I think, and it was kind of inconclusive. It was a war that was kind of

setting the scene for something larger. Athens was brought down by internal crisis.

The deal, it was also busy

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