Charity Challenge 2022 - Week 1 Night 1

Back! We’re back! This is our fifth year of doing the O’Sullivan charity challenge and our fourth year raising funds for CAMH. Thank you all so much for your support over the years, Rachel and I really enjoy this and together we’ve all raised $2,065 for the CAMH Foundation and this year we’re hoping to add another $600 to that number. If you’d like to donate you can do so here, and if you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing you can do that here.

Let’s go!

The Choice

Since I won last year’s competition it falls to Rachel to get us started with choosing a game. She’s going with one of her old faithful’s and has picked Patchwork for us to get the challenge started (the same game that started last year’s challenge!)

The Game

Patchwork is a puzzle game where players use Tetris like shapes to fill in a 9 by 9 grid.  There are two currencies in the game: time and buttons.  Both of these currencies appear on every piece you buy, buttons are a currency you use to purchase different puzzle pieces and you track time on a board; time is limited so you need to balance pieces between buttons and time, if you go too far on the time track too quickly you won’t buy enough pieces to cover your board, but if you don’t build up a button engine on your board you won’t be able to afford pieces. Every few spaces on the time board you’ll get paid based on the number of buttons you have on your board.  It’s a puzzle that’s very fun to play for two players.  If you’d like a full overview of the game you can check out this video.

The Result

This is one of Rachel’s strong games for a reason folks – she rarely loses. Game one was tight and I played really hard to starve her out of button income and it was looking like I was free and clear for a win. But I made a few misplays/got stuck somewhere in the middle of the game and Rachel managed to get ahead of me by about 2 turns to win the 7 point bonus token and with that in hand she easily finished out the game 7-3. Not exactly record setting scores, but hey, we’re warming into the challenge here.

Playing a best of three, we went into game two and Rachel was merciless; she won fairly easily and although the final score was fairly close (14-8 for Rachel) it seemed like she was never in danger.

So there we go! The challenge starts with a win for Rachel, and it’ll be up to me tomorrow to put a stop to her! See you tomorrow.