Playing can become very useful when it implies didactic purposes. Playing Quandary made me reflect about different points. The dilemma presented about gettig rid of yashors made me think a lot, I especially considered two possible solutions: poison the yashors, or setting a fence around the sheep. At the end, I decided to choose setting a fence to avoid any deaths; However, most of the people disaggred with me, they seemed to consider that was not enough to stop those creepy yashors. The farmer stated that he didn't have any opinion about my solution and the man in charge of construction said that building a fence would take too much time; fortunately, there were people in favor, like the historian who said that it was a good idea since nobody was going to be damaged; moreover, after all, the ones who did not agree accept to take turns to take care of the herd, just to be sure that everything was going well, so it seemed that I made a good decision.
I think that this is an acceptable exercise in order to develop problem solving skills; nevertheless, I thiink it is not complete because it does'nt allow users to come up with their own solutions, and I consider that people need to learn to think for themselves. I wouldn't apply it in my context for many reasons, we might not have enough resources, the situations are unrelated to our society, it involves a lot of critical thinking, but not enough problem solving skills, and finnally because it is not really interactive, so it may become a bored task for my students. Therefore, I would never use this game with my students.
