Monday, January 28, 2013
Expedition Africa
Last week we learned about explorers in Africa, including Dr. David Livingstone. Today, we played the online game Expedition Africa, which simulates one of Livingstone's expeditions. How far did you get? What were the greatest challenges? Did anything surprise you? Was there anything the game didn't take into account that you would have? Post responses to comments, and take the time to read and respond to each other's comments.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
17 comments:
Today while playing the incredibly fun online game "Expedition Africa," I did not get very far. Our group's continuous struggle throughout was maintaining enough food for our porters to consume. We tried our best to filter out our obstacles while rolling dice but a lot of an expeditions execution (in real life too) is based off luck and chance. There were a few strategies our group picked up on (rather slowly), and towards the end of the class we realized that the most efficient way to get the furthest in the game is to sometimes let porters go in order to enable us to advance further. We learned to keep an eye on our inventory and choose our dice based off of what we had and what we needed. Our team only got to 1720.
-Lena
1950*
On the game Expedition Africa, my team finished it once. The greatest challenges were having enough porters, having enough food and getting the right proportion of porters to food. This proportion was very hard to achieve because you had to think about the weight of the food in proportion to the amount of porters and the amount of food that the porters ate. I was surprised that sometimes leaving porters behind was easier than bringing them along and that not having a ton of food was sometimes better than having too much. The only thing that the game didn't take into account was wars.
-Maddy
While playing the game Expedition Africa in class my partner and I never actually completed the expedition. Although we were super close put our computer froze so we had to restart. We realized that it's hard to balance out the amount of porters and food, you need to have enough food for your porters, but sometimes we had to sacrifice a porter in order to get food.
-DeAndra
I didn't get very far in my expedition. My greatest challenge was having enough food. I realized that being an explorer wasn't always about how skilled you were but how lucky you were. I was surprised by how expendable the porters were. It was helpful to have enough porters so that there would still be some left when you encountered obstacles, yet not too many that they would eat all your food. It would be more realistic if there was a dice side for weather. Weather can hurt an expedition and slow you down.
-sabrina
Throughout all my numerous attempts to finish the expedition I never finished once. I found it difficult to keep a steady and consistent amount of supplies and to be more specific food. This game made me realize that is hard to be an explorer and that you have to make hard and tough moral decisions constantly. You need to sacrifice.
- Eugene
My group never made it to the finish line. However, we did come very close, we were fifty miles from reaching the goal but we ran out of food. I found it interesting that I never really thought about money and cures together or guns and ammo. If you don't have money you can't pay a doctor to come out and help a porter with their injury. Or if you have too much food and too many porters they get tired of carrying and slow down or the other way around, your porters can starve. Being an explorer is not as easy as I thought and comes with a lot of factors that can mess you up and slow you down and is a struggle along the entire way. - Nicole Meza
I thought that the Expedition game was very fun. Out of the 8 times I played the game I completed the entire game 4 times. What was very challenging was the decision making that was made throughout the game. For example, Trading in a porter for a vial of medicine or get a crate of food and be held back 3 days. I think that the weapons could've been more useful, I wasn't sure what it helped me with during the exploration. But for the most part I enjoyed playing the game.
Chris
After a couple of tries I finished the game. The hardest part was figuring out the proportionality between the food and the porters. You couldn't have too much food because it burdens the porters, conversely, you couldn't have too many porters because then they eat all of the food. I didn't try to gauge the proportion whatsoever. I didn't realize how quickly events could happen. In the same week two porters could contract malaria and another porter gets attacked by an animal. The game made it seem like nothing happened to the explorer himself and that he just seemed to be caught up in a series of unfortunate events.
- Kennedy
I was really surprised at how hard it was to beat the exploration game. I wasn’t expecting it to be so challenging. I think the farthest DeAndra and I got was to the fourth or fifth milestone. The two reasons why we kept losing were running out of food and running out of porters. On our first trial, we would take porters whenever we had the chance. But with so many porters, we ran out of food so quickly. In trying to fix this problem on the next trial, we took hardly any porters, and as many food options as possible. Even though we had plenty of food, we got three mosquito swarms and since we only had three porters and no medicine, it wiped everyone out. I think the trick to the game is to balance the amount of food and the amount of porters, to try to get as much medicine as possible, and not to waste any resources.
-Olivia
During class, I was able to complete the game twice. This is mostly due to luck, but that's beside the point. The biggest challenge was not alligators, lions or even the flue, but getting enough food to survive. Because of this, the best strategy was often to get a whole bunch of porters in order to keep yourself from getting killed off in one set of bad rolls, and then kill them off at every opportunity, especially if you can gain something out of it (ie: the upset porter milestone.) The one thing the game didn't account, which I think it should have, was the sheer size of the continent, as I feel the game was too short to properly represent all of the different challenges an African explorer would face.
~Ben
Playing the online game was really fun! The first game we played, my partner and I only a little father than The Uluguru Mountains. We failed because we ran out of food. With food, it is a difficult balance because you need enough to survive but if you have too much, it slows you down. In the second game we played, we got much farther. We got to the Ugalla River. I was surprised to see how much of a challenge weather is. There were heavy rains that created a deadly mountain rockslide. I also noticed all of the animals along the way that can be dangerous-- lions, mosquitos, deadly snakes, and pinching ants. I was also surprised by the amount of hard decisions that the main explorer has to make -- get supplies or lose a porter. I would have also considered water separate from food because that can be just or even harder than getting food.
I agree with Ben that if you get as many porters as you can, if you need to have a sacrifice for necessary medicine or supplies it would help win the game. Of course this game is just a game and in real life having someone sacrifice themselves we be a much bigger decision, so that must have been hard for the explorers. And reading some of the others, I realized that a lot of people had the same challenged that I had like having enough food.
It was really fun and I plan to keep playing so I can win! --Tristan
The game was fun at points and frustrating at other points. I was able to finish the game once.
What made it frustrating was at any moment you could run out of food or be attacked. The whole objective of the game is to win of course, nut the most efficient way to win is by systematically killing off your porters. This game resembles are the hardships in an actual expedition. This surprised me the most. I think this game included mostly everything except encounters with native people who may of fought back.
-Izzy
In the expedition, I made it all the way to the end, I was only 50 miles away before the expedition. The greatest challenges of the expedition was to keep on receiving food, it was les probable to get food than to get anything else. Also, the more porters the quicker they eat the food that is received. I didn't ever get to use my gun, I never ran into any wild animals which is not realistic. I really liked how we had to make decisions in the voyage
-Richard Palacios
I was able to finish the game several times. some of the challenges were deciding what i needed and what i didn't need, and whether to gamble or not in hopes that i could get something better. i had to sacrifice people for food so i could last until the end of the expedition. Food was the number one priority. the way that it was crucial to kill off porters in order to survive was very surprising. I don't think the game took into account that there may have been some native tribes who would have deterred the path that was being taken.
- shaun
Myles and I ended up getting all the way to the end, but the most challenging part to get there was food, and balancing out which supplies you actually needed. Because in some tries, we would have a ridiculous amount of medicine, but no food. And it would change. So it was hard to find a balance to stay alive with every single supply that one needed to find the source of the Nile.
-Will
Post a Comment