Charity Challenge Night 3 - Gismos

Welcome back to Night 3 of our Charity Gaming challenge!  If you’re just joining us we are raising funds and awareness for Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital!  If you’d like to donate or learn more please check out our donation page here.

Night 3 starts with me down by two games and if I lose tonight Rachel will carry week 1 and be on her way to retaining her trophy.  Not good.

The Choice

I need to go deep tonight.  I need to pick a game Rachel will not win at.  To do that I’m going to use the same rationale as last night (failed rationale from last night, but alas): I’m going to pick an engine building game.  This time I’m not fooling around, this game is literally just an engine puzzle, tonight I’m picking Gizmos.

The Game

Gizmos is an engine building game where on a given turn a player will take one of a few actions:  archive an enhancement, build an enhancement, pick a resource from the resource tray or conduct research to try and find an enhancement to match your needs from a deck.  The reason this is an engine building game is because the enhancements you build make your various abilities better and also causes them to trigger off of each other.  The game has a cool marble dispenser and looks pretty awesome on the table.

If you want to learn more about Gizmos you can check out this great play through video with rules explanation.

The Result

Last time we played this game Rachel was some combination of tired, disinterested and lost.  She lost bad.  One of my goals in this challenge is not to play games that we both won’t enjoy playing with each other so I made sure as we got into Gizmos she was comfortable with the game and had a better (and more well rested) grasp of the game.  And she got there – it was clear that she grasped the game much more this time and had a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

Rachel clearly led in the first half of the game.  She had around 2-3 more enhancements built and I thought she might be able to pull of a huge upset.  In the end her engine sputtered out in the mid game and I managed to shoot ahead, winning 40 to 29.

At last!  I’ve got a win on the board.  Looking forward to coming back tomorrow and seeing what Rachel throws at me!