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.