Charity Challenge Week 4 - Night 4

We’re getting down to wire in the Charity Challenge and sometime in the next few days we will be crowning a winner, I could even win tonight!

Just a reminder that we are doing all of this to raise funds for the Center of Addiction and Mental – if you’d like to donate or learn more you can do that here.

The Choice

So here we are – tonight I could win it all. But that means things are in Rachel’s hands. I laid out a bunch of games that I thought Rachel would have a good chance and enjoy playing. In the end she picked a game that has a strange history for her in this competition – it’s a game she literally always wins… EXCEPT … during the challenge. We’ve played it every year of the challenge, so tonight we play the staple, Patchwork.

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.  If you’d like a full overview of the game you can check out this video.

The Result

We decided to play a best of three as this is a relatively short game and it’s for all the marbles. Game 1 I played the best I’ve ever played. I built up a button economy that was just pumping out points. The problem is I’m not that good at the tetris component of the game and I ended up having loads of points, but also loads of minus points because I didn’t fill in my board. Rachel played steady and consistent as always and managed to almost completely fill in her board, it was a thing of beauty. Game 1 went to Rachel 30 to 27.

Game 2 was a bit more rough and tumble. We both were taking risks not wanting to lose. My version of rough and tumble though was to really think about the placement of my pieces and I managed to snag the bonus. It wasn’t pretty but I scraped out a win at 16-10.

Game 3 was tense. Rachel went back to playing more consistently and focused on developing her board a bit better. I continued to be… bad at this game, generally speaking. In the end the score was 21 to 13 and Rachel had lived to see another day, taking the win.

So there we go! Rachel stays alive and I have to try win tomorrow, but at least that will be on my own terms with a game of my choosing.