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East Africa · Maasai

Maasai Mara Ecosystem

A live simulation of five species — wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, lion and hyena — in which you can call rain, protect ground or release animals, and watch the populations answer.

Played in: Kenya · Tanzania

— The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Tools
Release

Pick a tool, then click the savanna.

Click or tap to play. Keyboard works too where the game uses it.

— What is playing against you

Nothing plays against you — obstacles arrive on a timer.

No opponent — a timer or a spawner
Nothing is playing against you. There is no opponent in this game at all — no model of you, no plan, no choices being weighed. What feels like an adversary is a spawn timer and a random number generator: obstacles appear on a schedule that tightens as your score rises. This is worth noticing precisely because it can feel otherwise. Difficulty that rises with time reads as an opponent responding to you, and it is not.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

The species are real and the broad shape of predator-prey cycles is real. The numbers are not: birth rates, death rates and carrying capacity are tuned to make a playable game rather than drawn from field data. The Maasai, whose land this is and whose grazing management shaped the reserve, do not appear in it at all.

— Sources

No sources have been attached to this entry yet. Until they are, treat everything above as provisional.

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