John

The next Immunity Challenge, "Island Rush" was a long and complex affair involving navigating the archipelago of the Camlooc Sea, trading commodities, precious metal and gems and battling ghouls in an updated version of Bill's 3-D game. This was a challenge where I felt somewhat comfortable in knowing what I was doing. I have some minimal training and experience with actual nautical and terrestrial navigation and presumed that this would help in the contest. Initially, I believe that it did but then Bill's inventive and challenging game management intervened. You can read more about this event here > Island Rush. The challenge concluded on October 11 2005. The crew of the "Venator de Leo", the ship manned by the iOfTheTiger team won the challenge by an amazingly close margin considering the duration of the event. Of course, this meant the MacLion tribe would face their first Tribal Council but I will let Diane tell you about that.

Diane

This challenge really wore us all out. We set sail from Castillo in a boat loaded with fuel, rations and a mysteriously eclectic cargo including coconuts, cotton and chickens. What were we supposed to do? We went to the first island and found they wanted to buy salt. Fine, we had some, but how much of our stock were we supposed to sell? If we sold it all, would we have none when we needed it later? There seemed to be no way to gain resources, so clearly we would use up all our fuel sailing between the islands before we found out what we had to do.
We all suspect Bill tweaked the rules a little as things went along, introducing currency, pawn shops and finally dumping maps into the game to try to tilt the odds in favor of us all not running out of fuel before we got anywhere.
By the time the MacLions discovered the short trade route where we could make the most profit, we were too far behind to catch up. The Tigers had won fair and square and we were faced with the awful prospect of losing one of our team. Lane, our web wizard and map magician, was voted off; he took this in good spirits and had won some decent prizes so he didn't leave empty-handed.
It was only after it was all over that I realized how neat the static structure of the Island Rush game was, even though the gameplay itself had been so hard to cope with. It made me appreciate how difficult it is to create a game that finds the perfect point of challenge on the continuum from impossible to trivially easy.