On a hot Sunday afternoon, a group of Mensans gathered at North Canal Road to do battle at the Mensa Games Competition organised by Settlers Cafe.

The turnout wasn’t exactly that fantastic. In fact, it was less than the previous month. Perhaps it was due to the H1N1 scare. Or perhaps people have already decided to concede to Prakash and didn’t bother to turn up.

Nevetheless, after a short briefing by the organisers, the competition started.

With the 7 games being contested of various game duration, it was important to strategize which games to compete in. After all, points were awarded based on the position you achieve in the game, the number of games you played in, and the duration of the games.

I joined a table to play “Settlers of Catan” while the other table started playing “For Sale”. I knew it was a foolish move to play that long game but then again, having fun today was more important than winning.

With seven heads pondering (and calculating) over every move, the game was closely matched. The luck of the dice roll (or perhaps my lack of skills) meant that I was always chasing the game. Progress was slow and I was just hoping for someone to end the game quickly.

While everyone was closely guarding the leading Sharon, our dear Patrick delivered an ambush at the final sprint and came up victorious.

That turned out to be crucial as it gave him enough points to emerge as the first runner-up in the overall standings.

It took us a solid 2.5hrs to complete the game.

Over at the other table, the other competitors were happily speeding through their games. In the time it took us to complete the Settlers of Catan game, the other group had already completed close to 8 games.

Our group then went to blitz through a few games of “Baker’s Dozen”, a quick moving game with not much thinking involved. I managed to devour the most number of donuts and finished with no points for two of the games.

Another participant from another table, Jin Sheng, said that the donuts in Baker’s Dozen looked very tasty and he was distracted by them. So he was busily  collecting donuts instead of trying to win the game. Although he did not win the game, he did ended with the most donuts for all colours(including green).

The results are as follows (no kelong, results are audited):

Lucky Draw

Top prize: Prakash
Consolation prize: Jin Sheng, Max, Patrick

Game Rankings

1st: Chin Siang
2nd: Patrick
3rd: Charlotte

Best Sportsmanship Award:

Chin Siang