Charity Challenge - Week 5 Night 1

Welcome to the final week of the Charity Challenge! All months Rachel and I have been playing board games every night to compete for our household Charity Challenge Cup! This year we’ve been raising money for the Center for Addiction and Mental Health.

Going into the final week we’ve raised $440 of our $600 goal, we’re getting very close now! If you’d like to donate, you can do so here.

The Choice

Since we agreed to a friendly choice of game to close out last week’s final lame duck night, the choice for game tonight reverts to Rachel after she lost the week last week. The final week of the competition is always difficult for Rachel – she’s played all of her obvious leg-up games and we get into the territory of much more common games where our win % is around 50/50 with usually 5-10% between us.

There’s one game that’s been good to Rachel in the Charity Challenge in years previous and in general when we play it. Tonight we’ll be playing Kulami.

The Game

Kulami, a two-player abstract strategy game, is played on several wooden tiles of different sizes, which are put together in a random fashion to form the board. Players place their pieces on the squares on the tiles. The placement of the previous piece dictates the rows in which the next piece may be placed.

The goal is to claim as many tiles as possible by occupying the majority of squares on a tile. Bonus points can be gained by completing rows or areas.

To learn about the game you can check out this video.

The Result

Just like when we played Kulami last year I got off to a stronger start today. We agreed to play a best of 3 and I managed to take down the first game by a decent margin (my personal best score) 29 to 18.

Our second game was much more hard fought and was very defensive with lots of blocking. In the end we drew 18-18, so that game was invalidated. Game three felt very tight, but in the end the score was 24-22 to ME! And with that I’ve won the first game of Week 5. This finish should be very interesting, tune in tomorrow to see how it develops!