Cards of Darkness Reflection

Cards of Darkness Reflection

    This Cards of Darkness game was very simple to understand and to play, but the possibilities for what could happen (as far as our moves were concerned) were endless. Staying passive and peaceful with the natives for the whole game, my team and I decided, would be a bit like a nice businessman… unsuccessful and not profitable. My team and I found that we had to use some force, but do it very strategically. We all decided fairly quickly that we had to use force at some point in order to be profitable. We decided that our strategy would be (put in it’s simplest form): 1) a little force 2) hold a good relationship with the natives 3) come in guns a’blazin. The more exact blueprint of our plan was this: 1) for the first 2 months, we would use heavy force in order to have a small surplus that would act like a “cushion” of money in case of bad weather or the slight chance of native hostility 2) for the next 6 months we completely changed our course of action and held every bit of force we had been dishing out on the natives in order to develop a good relationship with them so we would have minimal chances of native hostility, but still having that money “cushion” to keep us stable in the event of bad weather or native hostility 3) now we make a complete 180° turn all the sudden and come in using as much force as we could on the natives to extract as many resources, and by extension money, as we could while still having a relatively clean native relations pile which lowered our chances of native hostility. After the game was over, we were quite profitably and very happy with the strategy that we had come up with. I think that what this game teaches us is not about the importance of profit and it is not promoting hostility, but it is teaching us the importance of strategy. It also teaches us that when we as a nation were expanding and conquering, we hurt many people on our quest. This reminds me of the quote that we studied by Joseph Conrad that says “It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog,” which is what this game effectively demonstrates. The quote is saying that in order to rule, you must be able to overlook and dismiss all of the terrible things that you will have to do on your way to becoming a ruler. In the case of the game, we (the players [the ones wanting to rule]) had to violently take the resources, which was not ours, from the natives in order to be profitable and win.