Maasai Mara

I had the pleasure of visiting Maasai Mara in 2007 and everything in this game is inspired by this beautiful national reserve. .

The nature types

The five different nature types (grove, bush, savannah, river and waterhole) correspond to the nature types of Maasai Mara and initially I planned for 30 different animals as well that would match those. However, for game-technical reasons it was better to have the players look for 6 different animal types in 5 different colors instead.

The jeeps

The jeep drivers with their ability to locate the animals are the true heroes of both the national reserve and the game. Similar to the game, they have to drive at specific paths and they do keep in touch with each others through the radio so that the animals spotted by one driver will quickly be known to all the others. In reality, this means that one animal will attract several jeeps, particularly if the animal is a rare one among the "big five". However, game-technical reasons superseded the theme once more as finding animals on yor own are more fun than driving to others findings. Thus, each tourist has its unique favorite animal and one driver's spotting signals to the other drivers to look elsewhere.

The tracks

How about the tracks then? The mechanic that driving is faster at known paths (with tracks) is mainly game-technical, since it's less fun to drive past already known tiles. However, there is a thematic explanation as well. Due to weather conditions, paths not driven on for a while may turn out to be unreliable and we did indeed get stuck for hours at one point during our safari. Weather even explains why tracks may be removed from a path when a player runs out of them - they were simply washed away by a sudden rain!