"Frieden ist nicht selbstverständlich." - 

peace is not something that can be taken for granted"

(Jean Claude Juncker)

This project is part of our Erasmus+ project "Sailing the sea of time - European history as OUR [hi]story". It was the main topic for the third year of our project.

Students from six European countries (Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Slovenia) developed board games together. These games show individual biographies in the context of European history. The players of these games have to act together to reach a common goal: e.g. to make the Berlin wall fall or to help Louis XIV to bring peace and French culture to other European countries, not war.

When we started planning our project more than three years ago, we chose the motto:

"Frieden ist nicht selbstverständlich. /

peace is not something that can be taken for granted".

This was because we planned to deal with e.g. the Balkan wars, having in mind that only three decades ago, in the early 90`s, there had been war in Europe - and that, around about the same time, it was not clear that the change in Germany or other countries would have a peaceful ending.

What we DIDN'T expect was, that this motto should become reality during the time of our project: That there would be war again in and near Europe in 2022/23. So we developed our games under the awareness that peace and peaceful change will remain a goal - and at least in our games we could make it reachable.

Physical mobilities that took place at some points of this project gave new impulses to our project and strengthened our collaboration:

At the beginning of October 2022 students of all six partner countries met in Croatia (Nasice) and (after the principle "collaborative board game" had been introduced by students from Wilhelmshaven) developed in multilateral teams stories and characters  that should be turned into board games.  After this, we worked online together, using video chat and padlets, to turn these first ideas into a real game with board, tasks, activity cards etc.. When another group of students had the chance to meet just a few weeks later in November in Greece (Volos), they planned an exemplarious board game together about Greek mythology (Jason and the Argonauts) as common base of our European culture and history, working at the place of its origin. The online collaboration continued. As our board games, however, should be a physical object, every local team was responsible to produce one of the games in handcraft - but also to invite the partners to contribute ideas and tasks. We worked with the prototypes of our board games in March 2023 in Italy (Perugia) and had some more time to finish them: It was in May in Slovenia (Ljubljana) that we were "united by playing" and enjoyed our final products.

We shared the files "behind" the games and started to rebuild all games in each school. In this way the games are present in all of our schools and will be played in the school libraries on special occasions like the "Erasmus days".