Charity Challenge Week 5 - Night 1

We’ve reached the final week of the Charity Challenge! This year time has flown by, we’ve raised some money for charity and the competition has been tighter than ever.

Thank you to Matt for donating! Thanks to you all, we are 50% of our way to our goal, and we are thrilled to to have been able to raise money for the Center of Addiction and Mental Health. If you’d like to donate you can do so here.

The Choice

After Harvest Dice blew up in my face and cost me week 4, I get to pick the lead game for week 5. I’ve decided in the spirit of the competition to do something that’s fun but I think I can win!

For tonight I’m picking On Tour.

The Game

The publisher did a great job describing this game in the official description:

You’re living the dream. You’re in a band and they’re about to go on tour. It’s your job to schedule the band’s stops over your 100-day tour, visiting as many states as possible.

Each turn in On Tour, two ten-sided dice are rolled to make two two-digit numbers. For example, a roll of 3 and 7 creates the numbers 37 and 73. All players write each of those numbers in a state on their map. The regions they can write in are restricted by three cards turned up in the middle of the table.

At the end of the game, each player draws a route on their map, starting with a low number and visiting adjacent states with higher and higher numbers. Players get a point for every state they visit.

There are also some bonus points available, a way to get wilds, and a variable set-up step that makes every game different.

If you’d like to learn more about the game, check out this video.

The Result

For On Tour we decided to play best of three and for the first game we both weren’t super sure how to play in a way that would let us create large routes. The rulebook example showed someone getting 25 points, in the end our first final score was 12 to 10 in my favour. So while I managed to get the win, we had room for improvement.

Game two was much more tense and we clearly had a bigger clue what was going on and how to play. When we first counted up our routes at the end of the game I thought Rachel creamed me, but then I redrew my route and I managed to win 18 to 17.

Two really close games, but I managed to take the night in two games! Week 5 is off to a strong start!