480 BC · Thermopylae, Greece
Leonidas and roughly 300 Spartans with allied Greeks held the narrow pass against Xerxes' vast army for three days before being encircled by a mountain path.
In 480 BC Xerxes crossed the Hellespont with an army the Greeks could not match in the open, intending to finish what his father Darius had begun at Marathon ten years earlier.
The Greek answer was geography. At Thermopylae the road between the mountains and the sea narrowed to a few metres, and a small force could hold it while the allied fleet fought at Artemisium. Sparta sent Leonidas with a royal guard of three hundred, alongside several thousand allies from other cities.
For two days the Greeks held. In the pass, numbers were worthless: the Persians could bring only as many men to the fighting line as the Greeks could, and the long spear and heavy shield of the hoplite decided every exchange.
On the third day a local man showed the Persians a mountain track around the pass. Leonidas, warned in time, sent most of the allied contingents away and stayed with the Spartans, the Thespians and the Thebans. They were surrounded and killed.
Militarily it was a defeat that delayed rather than stopped the invasion. What survived was the example, and the demonstration that terrain could cancel numbers — a lesson Greece used again the following year.
The stand became the most retold episode of the Persian Wars, which is worth remembering when reading any account of it: the story has been polished for two and a half thousand years.
The scenario is built on holding rather than winning: Sparta's problem is to make a narrow front pay for as long as possible, Persia's is to find a way around it.
The sides, the commanders and the shape of the problem are historical. The cards and the turn economy are the game's own, and the match is short where the battle took three days.