Savage Ra Rampaged During Final!

The sun god shined brightly this year, and the final table suffered under the heat of the gaze of Ra.

The finalists were Eugene Yee, Donna Griffin, Nate Heiss, and Aaron Kaltman. Aaron declared before the game started that he was worried he would fall victim to his family's curse of coming second, and I cautiously assigned him a full 25% chance of this coming true.

No matter anyone's strategy or optimism however, Ra Dice is about the will of Ra, and this year Ra was a merciless and punishing god. Turn after turn the players rolled suns, both accelerating the game dramatically and annihilating any progress the players managed to make through disasters. By the end of Age 1 we saw little progress on any front, and disasters rolled by both Nate and Donna kept people down.

Players start the game with a combined total of 46 points, and though the most points are scored at the end of the game players usually do build up towards it. Not this time though! By the time Age 1 ended the combined score of the players was 34, a full 12 points below their starting values!

The players were busy laughing at the sorry state of the game, wondering what the rules were for going negative in score. They clearly hoped that the desperate times of Age 1 were behind them. Their hopes were in vain though because Ra did not let up in the least, and in Age 2 the suns kept on coming. The players rocketed through the age, with Nate rolling yet another disaster to keep the monuments scoring area nearly devoid of tokens. By the end of Age 2 the players had managed to get their combined score up to 49, a full 3 points ahead of their starting total, but Donna and Nate were still below their starting point total.

Age 3 was to bring no reprieve. The suns kept coming, and in general people were bemoaning their terrible rolls. Aaron even decided to flood with his token sitting at zero on the river track, and everyone agreed that this was actually the best choice he could have made with the rolls he had. The game was coming close to an end when Nate was faced with a difficult choice: He had 2 suns in front of him and could end the game on his turn. He did the math and realized this would guarantee him a second place finish.

Second place is not good enough for Nate though! He rerolled, loudly beseeching Ra for more suns, and Ra answered in the affirmative. Another disaster crushed the board, demolishing what few monuments the people other than Nate had managed to build. Shortly after the game ended, with the players scoring 1, 1, 2, and 17 from monuments. I have never seen a game with such low monument scoring before, but here it is. That 17 from monuments was enough to carry Nate to victory with a score of 30. Aaron Kaltman continued his family tradition of getting second with 24, Eugene was barely behind at 23, and Donna ended the game at 19.

Notably flooding with the river track at zero ended up scoring Aaron 3 points, so his admittedly strange choice worked out for the best.

Perhaps next year we will see a final table with a slightly less savage Ra, possibly even letting the players actually build something that will last.