Charity Challenge Week 5 - Night 3

The final 3 nights are here, it’s been an incredible journey with you all and Rachel and I want to thank you for coming along with us. We’ve been doing this challenge to raise money for Toronto’s Center of Addiction and Mental Health. We’re currently sitting at $270 of our $500 goal. If you’d like to donate you can do so here.

Thank you to our most recent donor Nicole! The Toronto board game family has been very generous donating to our campaign and Nicole is one of the wonderful people I’m lucky to know from gaming in the city.

The Choice

The week sits at 1-1 following my loss in Schotten Totten last night. There’s a game that we rarely play anymore (despite having played it over 15 times) because I usually win and the game has a problem where if someone pulls away it’s nearly impossible to catch up. But guys I’m 2 wins away from winning my first charity challenge and I’ve decided to go for it.

Tonight we’re playing Pagoda.

The Game

In Pagoda players play cards to build Pagodas, requiring four columns per level.  As the Pagodas grow placing columns becomes more and more valuable.  The balance is between building up Pagodas on your turn that could be used by your opponent on their turn before you get to build on it.  The magic is that you can see 5 of the 7 cards your opponent has.  So you work around what they have, enabling the building of coloured columns that your opponent doesn’t have access to.  The game ends when 4 complete Pagodas are built.

To learn more about this game check out this video.

The Result

This game of Pagoda started more or less true to type. I broke out and because we know this game has a problem with run away leaders we thought it was over – but Rachel push as hard as possible and did the unthinkable – she caught up. In the end we had our first ever tie and we decided to do a game two as there was no tie breaker for the game.

Statistics were against Rachel here. I have a 75% win percentage with Pagoda and her catching up and getting the game to a tie was an achievement in and of itself. And so it went. Game two was a pretty routine win for me.

So there we go! I’m now up 2-1 and 1 win away from winning the whole competition. Tune in tomorrow and see if I can FINALLY clinch a win in the Charity Challenge.