Charity Challenge Week 1 - Night 2
Thanks for checking in on Rachel’s and my charity challenge for 2019! If you’re just joining us you can learn more about why we’re doing this here or if you want donate in support of CAMH you can do that here.
We’ve raised our first $50, 10% of the way to our $500 goal. Thank you to Guarav and Joanna for their donation and for all their support and friendship!
Let’s get to the challenge…
The Choice
Now this might seem like showboating on Rachel’s part, but when I asked Rachel about her choice tonight she simply said “she thought it’d be fun to play this game”. Someone’s confident despite losing on the first night.
For tonight’s game Rachel has chosen a charity classic challenge, one of the few games to be played every year. It’s a game that I almost always win…. UNLESS… it’s during the charity challenge, in which Rachel has won all of the games.
Tonight we’re playing Charity Challenge classic – 7 Wonders Duel
The Game
7 Wonders Duel is the two player re-implementation of the very popular 7 Wonders, a drafting game where you pick cards to build out a civilization from resources, to commerce and more. In 7 Wonders Duel two players take turns picking cards from a structured pyramid to build their civilization. Some cards give you resources, some cards give you science, or military and some give you economic advantages. There are three ways to win: by having the most points at the end of the game OR collecting 6 different sciences (the game ends immediately when you collect a sixth science breakthrough) OR militarily by defeating your foe (if your military grows a certain strength beyond your opponent the game ends immediately).
There’s a lot going on in this fantastic two player package. If you’d like to learn more please check out this excellent video from PEI’s Rodney Smith.
The Result
Oh man, this was a major case of deja vu. If you want some spoilers for how this year’s 7 Wonders Duel match went, I suggest you check in with last year’s result.
First – this game was TENSE. Usually we can crank this game out in 30 minutes max (our last game was during our trip to PEI and we finished it in 15 minutes, WE FLY when we play this game now days) but tonight the game took almost 45 minutes. We were counting the number of cards, you could literally see the beautiful mind calculations flying around the room. There was blocking, counter moves and “oh no you did not” moments aplenty.
The game is played over 3 eras and usually someone is feeling good coming out of era 1. They have a plan, they’ve managed to get all the resources they need. We finished era 1 and just sort of stared across the table at each other. We were laser focused.
You for sure couldn’t separate out who was ahead at any point in the game. In fact the game came down to the second last turn. You see, in the tradition of when we play this game in the Charity Challenge Rachel had pushed me hard on the military track. (Reminder – if your military becomes sufficiently strong you immediately win). The entire third era I was constantly counting out the moves making sure Rachel couldn’t take a card that would allow her to win on military. At some point I made a mistake, and Rachel capitalized. And after drafting the second last card of the game, Rachel managed to snag the last military card and secured her military victory.
We counted up our scores for fun and it was a tie, 60 to 60. Remember last year? A Rachel military win with a score tie. Unbelievable she’s pipped me again.