Charity Challenge 2021 - Week 1 Night 4

Another day, another Charity Challenge game night! Rachel and I are playing board games every night for 5 weeks to raise funds in support of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

We’ve raised $35 of our $600 of our goal for this year, if you’d like to donate you can do so here.

The Choice

Rachel lost last night and the result is she’s in a bit of a corner – she’s 1-2 down on the week and if she loses tonight I’ve taken the win for week 1.

We’ve been optimizing for fun the last few nights but the time has come for for Rachel to get serious to fight back for control of Week 1. For her choice today she’s picked one of the games she brought into our house, and she regularly wins at – 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

What a back and fourth this was… Rachel took an early lead and it looked like she was going to play a tight game and see it through. HOWEVER. I got really lucky. In the game if you place the 6th piece, you score a Qwirkle, which gets you six bonus points. And I did that, over and over again. I was a Qwirkle machine.

At one point I opened a 30-40 point lead and that’s not the type of thing you come back from. In the last play of the game Rachel scored 20 points and as I hit the add points button on the scoreboard it ended up reading 229 to 227 for me! It was an unbelievable comeback from Rachel but she fell a little short in the end.

And with that I’ve won week 1! We’ll be back tomorrow for the dead rubber game of week 1 and then next week Rachel will be picking the game to fight back and try and claim week 2.