Charity Challenge Week 1 - Night 3
Night 3! This year the charity challenge feels like part of the furniture around here. We’ve been looking forward to this for a few months now and we’re right at it and it feels like we’ve been playing a game a day for months, in constant battle.
We received another donation going into Night 3! Thank you to Sara & Duncan for getting us to $100 of our $500 goal, 20% of the way there. Sara is part of the DNA in the Toronto board game scene, and I’m lucky to count her as a friend.
If you’d like to donate to our charity drive in support of CAMH please visit our donation page here.
The Choice
We’re one win a piece going into night 3 and I lost 7 Wonders Duel on Night 2 so it’s over to me to pick a game tonight. One of my guiding principles for this challenge is to not pick games Rachel will hate playing. She doesn’t necessarily love every game we play but manages to find the fun in most of our games.
Tonight I’m toeing the line with a game she just doesn’t get. We’ve only found a few games where at the end of it Rachel just says “I don’t get it”. And it’s really random what games these are – some are complex, some are not. There’s just some games that refuse to click for her.
For tonight’s game 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 year when we played Gizmos (on night 3 in similar circumstances, oddly) Rachel came our strong and I eventually managed to push past her. This year I think it’s fair to say I led from the start. Rachel dislikes this game more than I thought and I think struggled to get into it and grasp it (this one is just a miss for her I think).
As a result it was an easy win for me – in the end I took the night 42 to 29!
Not the most fun night we’ll have together in the challenge, but as Rachel was quick to point out (she’s way more competitive than I am) getting a win on the board trumps everything. Tomorrow I have the opportunity to claim the first week’s points, but can Rachel stop me? We’ll find out, it’s in her hands.