Everyone came into class wondering why the chairs had
changed from rows to groups. My group had no clue about what we were about to
do and what we were about to understand with a simple card game. The name of
the game was Cards of Darkness, just like the book we were reading, Heart of
Darkness. Throughout the game we had to make decisions that would either make
or break in the game. We had to decide whether to press for resources and have
the natives hate us or not have anything other than the one resource we started
with. It took us some time to finish because we were really thinking about each
move we made throughout the game. So in result we did not win but that wasn’t
our goal it was truly just to understand what we were doing.
As we started to get closer to the end the more bad cards
came to us. I picked up the ace and things just went downhill from there. We
had a monsoon that caused us to have rain for 2 months following. If we didn’t
have those bad cards at the end and had them closer to the beginning I believe
we could have ended the game with more resources. We did end up with one more
resource than we started with, which wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t press
the natives for more resources. Also, when we had the bad weather we had to
take away a card from native relations and give them one of our force cards
meaning we had one less peace with the natives.
The factors that influenced the choices we made were to end
up still having resources at the end of the year. We thought about pressing but
that would make the natives upset at us. That was something we really didn’t
want to have because we needed to have resources at the end of the year. If we
would’ve started off with the rainy months I think that would have pushed us to
change the choices we made about pressing and not pressing. I believe that my
group made really smart decisions about the choices we made and we didn’t try
to be so forceful at the beginning, which left us with a lot of force at the
end to use. It was a realistic experience because people actually went through
these types of things.
Overall I think this game helped us in a way to understand
the book. We were new on someone else’s land, demanding for stuff. If I were
one of the natives I would be pretty upset as well, that’s not their land to
control. Just as the book “Heart of Darkness” does. We learned how to work
together to finish the game with resources and learned how to understand what
overall happened inside the book involving the characters of the book. It was a
fun experience for us all even though we didn’t get to have cookies. :(
