Charity Challenge 2020 - Week 1 Night 1

Here we are for the 5th annual running of the O’Sullivan Family Charity Challenge! Thank you all for coming back to another year and for all of your support.

This year we are again raising money for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Mental health is a cause near and dear to my heart, as I’ve struggled in recent years with depression and anxiety and while I’ve been lucky to have the privilege to be able to afford a therapist and have been able to get help with my own challenges that isn’t true for everyone. CAMH is a key partner in the community who provides services to people need.

If you’d like to donate you can do so here. This year we’re trying to raise $600 (to meet what we raised last year) and we’d appreciate any help you can provide! A big thank you to Reed for being our first donor this year <3

Throughout the month I will be sharing more about my experiences and more about CAMH, I hope you’ll check back in occasionally to see how the Charity Challenge is doing!

Ready to get this started? Let’s do it!

The Choice

Guys, believe it or not I actually won last year. Take a close look at the trophy and you’ll notice that isn’t usually the case. Because Rachel is the last person to lose a game last year she gets to pick the first game this year.

Rachel has gone hard in the paint on her first choice, choosing a game that I have never won against her. Tonight we’re playing Qwirkle!

The Game

Qwirkle is a game that plays sort of like Scrabble, but with colours and shapes.  There are 6 different shapes in 6 different colours and you need to lay out combinations of those shapes and colours.  A row can either be made up of the same colour in different shapes or different colours of the same shape.  Each tile placed is worth a point (and includes re-scoring if you link into tiles already placed) and if you manage to get six in a row down you get a Qwirkle, giving you 12 points for that completed row.

To learn more about Qwirkle check out this video.

The Result

Alright. Tonight hurt, tonight was a beating. Tonight was such a bad beating that I’m going to share a graph about it:

Here you can see Rachel and I were nice and tight for the first third of the game, after which you can see Rachel just lay on the beating. Rachel scored TWO back to back Qwirkles. Rachel scored 8 Qwirkles to my TWO. Rachel scored as many back to back Qwirkles as I did Qwirkles total. Ouch.

I didn’t have high hopes for tonight after Rachel picked out her game and so it came to pass. Now I’ve gotta back strong tomorrow, see you then!