Week 2 - Day 1 Board Game Charity Challenge
On to week 2! Thank you for continuing to follow Rachel’s and my quest to play board games every day of the month of November with the goal of raising awareness and funds for Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital! To date we’ve raised $225 of our goal of $500. If you’d like to donate please visit my fundraising page.
Rachel won week 1 so today I picked our game to start off week 2. Want to know how a game is good? Tell your fiancee you’ve picked a game she’s played 10 times but never won and her response is “Oh, I love that game”. That’s right, today I played one of my 100% win ratio trump cards to come out strong for the week. For our game tonight I’ve selected Century Spice Road
Century is an engine building and trading game.
Above is what the game looks like on the table; you use the cards in the bottom row to upgrade spices (represented by the cubes) to buy the trade routes in the top row. You start with two cards that generate and upgrade resources, but are very inefficient. As you go you’ll go from only having the ability to generate the lowest value resource (the yellow cubes) to being able to very quickly upgrade to multiple types of the upgraded cubes. It sounds thinky and it is but it’s highly approachable. Tonight when Rachel and I played we played at 100 miles an hour, if you watch pros play chess at speed that’s what speed Rachel and I were going at in Century tonight. It’s very approachable and is considered a great gateway game to introduce non gamers to the strategic side of the hobby. For a full look at how the game plays check out Radho’s run through of the game.
As I said we played this game at a blistering pace. This was our 10th time playing the game and it showed. Rachel pulled out ahead early (the game ends when someone is able to purchase their 6th trade route) and she was able to keep a +1 trade route lead over me for most of the game. My engine in this game however was AMAZING. By far the best I’ve ever built in the game and I was able to very quickly generate the top tier resources very quickly. In the end I delivered a one-two punch and picked up my 5th and 6th trade routes back to back ending the game and leaving me in a good position to win.
The final score was 84-70 for me. A personal best score for both of us – I think we’ll be seeing Rachel’s first win real soon.
Week 2 is off to a good start for me! We will have to see what Rachel pulls out of the bag tomorrow.