Charity Challenge 2021 - Week 2 Night 2

And we’re back! It’s been a bit of a week, so we’re a day or two behind on getting these blogs up, I am very sorry for that, but we’ll get caught up as quick as we can!

We’ve raised $105 of our $600 goal in support of CAMH. If you’d like to donate you can do so here.

Let’s get right into it.

The Choice

Rachel pulled off a bit of an unexpected win in night 1 of this week, so it’s over to me to choose tonight’s game. I’ve decided to stick with the theme of newer games we haven’t really played for my choices this week. So tonight we’re playing a recent family game called Juicy Fruit

The Game

Juicy Fruit reminds me of one of those cell phone games / puzzles where you’re moving around squares to achieve some goal. In Juicy Fruit you have an island where on your turn you move fruits around, and depending on how many spaces that fruit moved you’ll get that many of that fruit. You are then using those fruits to fulfil orders. The official blurb from the publisher will do a bit of a better job of describing it

Each player has their own small island paradise where they grow delicious fruit. To win, you must gain the most points by cleverly supplying ships and by adding the best businesses to your island.

Your turn in Juicy Fruits works like this: First, you slide one of your fruit collector tokens a number of unblocked spaces and collect that many fruits of the token’s type: banana, orange, lime, pomegranate, or mangosteen. Then you may either fulfill the order of a ship on your shores or claim a business from a shared display and place it onto your island (or do nothing). Clever planning and timing is vital because until you supply the ships on your shores, they block valuable island space which could be used to collect more fruit — but if you concentrate too much on the ships, the most promising businesses may get snatched by your opponents. Also, the sooner businesses are claimed, the quicker the game might end.

Boardgamegeek.com

The Result

So when I picked this game, I’m not going to lie I did it knowing that given infinite time to master the game Rachel would beat me every day of the week. I was kinda hoping I would ramp up to the puzzle faster and beat Rachel in 2 of the 3 games before she was able to really get her head around the puzzle. I say that because this is for sure a game Rachel will beat me in any day of the week.

And so it was. We were neck and neck in our first game and we ended up tying. The tie breaker is whoever took the last turn and that broke in Rachel’s favour. At this point I figured I could still squeeze the juice out of this and get the win.

Not so much. In the second game it wasn’t even close. Rachel got ahead, stayed ahead, and continued to push ahead.

Week 2 is sitting firmly in Rachel’s hands, 2-0 is going to be difficult for me to come back from, but I will try!