First, a quick review of the purpose of this tool. The idea is that you can have your students try to conquer the largest number of countries by correctly answering questions you pose. Usually I have easy and hard questions. If they answer an easy question they get to conquer a neutral (white) country. If they answer a hard question they get to steal a country from an opponent! In the end, the group with the most countries wins. (It's up to you what that means.) The competition and strategy involved in this game can really get students motivated to do their best to answer your questions!
In this version of the game I have made several improvements over the original version as detailed here:
- You can choose which countries to play with from among 167 real-world countries. You can limit the countries played with by choosing which continent(s) they're on, what language(s) they speak, what the minimum size (area) of the countries is, what their minimum population is, and what the minimum GDP per capita is.**- After you have settled on which countries to use and started the game, you can move the camera around with the following commands:
- W/S to move up/down.
- A/D to move left/right.
- Q/E to adjust the zoom.
- The game now keeps track of how many countries each color owns, so its easier to see how everyone is doing.- You can download the game for Windows here. (After downloading the file, unzip it and run the executable.)
Well, that's it for now. If you have any suggestions or comments or if you have used this tool in your class and have an anecdote about how it went, I'd love to hear from you! Please comment below and/or send me an email.
** (All data for this game was pulled from the CIA World Factbook. So it's also kind of fun just to mess around with the options and learn about the countries of our world.)
