Game Of Trades

Today in English we played a game called 'Game of Trades', which is supposed to symbolize the making of a new life for you and your family and living 'the American Dream'. The object of the game was to fully achieve your goals of shelter/housing, food, education, and resources with the starting materials you had. Now of course, you did not start out with all of the resources that you needed so you had to trade resources with other tables or 'countries'. My team lost the game because, in my opinion, we did not trade enough right in the beginning when the other players/countries didn't know what they needed or didn't need resources-wise. My group waited till the very end to trade, thus hurting us because everyone else had the all the resources they needed and didn't want to trade them away for something they already had. It was actually really hard to trade items because you not only wasted time trying to trade with people, but there is also no way of knowing if that group is actually going to trade with you. This correlates to what we are learning in class about the American Dream because it shows that even though people start out with different resources at their disposal, they all start out at the same place and with the same goals. The different resources each group had and the need to trade between groups symbolized that it takes cooperation and multiple people to achieve your goals. However, it also teaches you that people won't always be there to help you and you have to make your own choices and live with the consequences, like my group did for not trading with other groups/countries.