Charity Challenge 2022 - Week 1 Night 2

Welcome back to charity challenge night 2. We’re raising money in support of CAMH and mental health care, if you’d like to learn more or donate you can do so here.

The Choice

Rachel managed to win Patchwork in night 1 so the choice falls to me to pick tonight’s game. Since we’re early in the competition I think I’ll choose a game where I have a slight edge but we haven’t played in a while but really love (that’s part of this month for us – rediscovering games we haven’t played in a long while).

For the second night of the competition I have selected Mandala!

The Game

Mandala is a two player only game where players collect sets of cards, battling out at two locations on the board to get cards that are valuable for themselves, but not valuable for their opponent. The official description of the game gives a good overview:

In the two-player game Mandala, you are trying to score more than your opponent by collecting valuable cards — but you won’t know which cards are valuable until well into the game! Over the course of the game, players play their colored cards into the two mandalas, building the central shared mountains and laying cards into their own fields. As soon as a mandala has all six colors, the players take turns choosing the colors in the mountain and adding those cards to their “river” and “cup”. At the end of the game, the cards in your cup are worth points based on the position of their colors in that player’s river. The player whose cup is worth more points wins.

Want to learn more? You can check out this video here that gives an overview.

The Result

Here’s a little preview of how this went. We played 4 games in a best of 3!

Game 1 got off to a slow start as we eased into playing the game (it’s been a few years since we played it) and in the end I managed take Rachel down 52 to 27, a clear victory.

Game 2 was a different matter all together. We went back and fourth and in the end tied at 53 a piece. The game has a tie breaker and we even tied on that. So that’s a wash, and how we managed to play 4 games in this best of 3.

Going into game 3 things were tense. Rachel and I were both staring at the board and very absorbed in the action. Rachel went absolutely ham and scored a personal best 69 to my 28. She absolutely dominated me in this game.

So off to game 4 to decide the whole thing! We had a real slug fest full of tension and lots of back and fourth moments. In the end Rachel completed her back to back victory to start off this year’s competition. She won the game 65 to 58.

So there we are, day two is in the bag and Rachel is up 2-0 on the week. If she can manage to win tomorrow she’s already wrapped up the week. We’ll see you tomorrow to see if she pulls it off.