Day 5 Extra Life Challenge

We’ve reached the end of Week 1 and it’s been a blast so far raising money for Sick Kids hospital!  To date we’ve raised $225 of our $500 goal and we’re so thankful for all the donations and support we’ve had so far.  If you’d like to support Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital donate here.  No donation is too small and all proceeds directly support children in need.

Going in to the final game day of week 1 we’re all tied up 2-2 on the week and because Rachel lost at Clank! yesterday she gets to pick the game today.  What’d she pick?  Pretty much a sure win on her part – Quarto 

Quarto is a an abstract game where you play on a 4 by 4 grid.  You hand a player their piece for the round and they place it on the board.  So you are constantly looking at where your opponent can win while trying to set them up to let you win.  You win if you get a row of the same colour, the same height or the same hole or full status (some tiles have holes in them, some are solid).  It’s a minified and compressed version of chess.

For more information on Quarto check out this video.

Rachel knew what she was doing in this game.  She had over a 70% win percentage going in to this match and this was probably as close to a sure thing as she could have picked.

We decided we would play best of five as this is a quick game and hopefully I would be able to have a fighting chance.

Our first game was very tense and in the end we actually managed to draw.  This has happened to us once before and my understanding is that statistically this is highly unlikely.  We’re special or something.

After that it was all Rachel.  She won the following two games easily.  We then took a slight break talking about her day (she started a new job today!) and slowly ramped in to game 4.  I thought I had her misdirected and distracted but it turns out she saw a win condition I did not and she took in 4 games with the draw.

Shot well aimed, and well taken.  I’ve dropped week 1 to Rachel three games to two.

We’ll be back tomorrow to start game week 2 where I’ll get to pick the game and I intend to ramp up the pressure.