Cards of Darkness and strategy games

The natives were of no concern to me. As they were not real. My only goal was to win the game. At first I wondered if there was a trick – a secret to beating the game. I thought through strategies. I thought Mr. Lindsey likes video games. In video games if you choose the nice options like not harvesting ‘Little Sisters’ for the maximum amount of eve in Bioshock 2 and instead having them thank you and crawl away giving you less eve therefore less chances of upgrading your skills, good things happen. Like your daughter doesn’t kill you in cold blood. Or if you don’t steal random things or kill many people in Fall Out 3 you get good Karma which helps in numerous ways even if you have to run from scavengers instead of giving them what they deserve. But then I realized this was not a video game. These were cards. Mr. Lindsay made this up over Christmas. There is no way that much time spent near relatives in close inescapable quarters would lead anyone to create a game that encourages a true and honest path. So that’s when my team and I got to work. We pressed the natives from the get go. We realized there was no way for us to get resources without using force. We took our chances with the Native Relations pile and we used our ammo unsparingly. We fell into a lulling routine. Quickly gaining and losing our resources and tainting our native relations pile with clubs. We were power hungry. We wanted those diamond cards. Much like Romeo portrayed by Leonardo Dicaprio in the death scene of the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet we had nothing left to lose.

Except our ammo. And when we were out of ammo; we had our precious diamonds taken from us. One by one our beautiful resources pile was diminished. It was painful. Each Diamond card removed from the deck to satisfy angry natives or recover from rainy weather was unwillingly given up. Shaky hands replaced the resources back in the hands of the now livid natives. And almost at the end of our second to last round was when I had my realization.

this was my face after the realization

IT WAS ALL CHANCE. Dang it. There was no strategy. Even if you had the worst strategy in the world if your weather was great and your natives were happy (even if you had been mean to them) you would win. THE ONLY THING YOU NEEDED TO WIN THE GAME WAS GOOD LUCK. (Or a cheater’s shuffle who knows – I mean I’m not pointing fingers at any other teams but…) 

I realize I got a bit caught up in the game. I wanted to win. I wanted resources.
I thought a while. Would I really act like this if put in a real life situation similar to it? And the answer was no. I could never threaten another person for no reason. Just like I could never actually skin and kill an animal like I was forced to do in Far Cry 3 to survive. Or if I was faced with zombies like I was in Left 4 Dead? I would be alone in a bathtub crying while the AI fought the zombies eventually leaving me alone as they were killed off one by one. And then I would die - because I would probably startle a witch. 

this is how cool we looked

It's important for me to remember it was just a game. I acted like a horrible person. We did get a hella rad amount of resources though. If it had been real? And I was a stone cold witch? I would say we did a pretty good job.