I finished one of the two weekly challenges on Pogo.com last Wednesday afternoon, after the new challenges came out that same morning.  It was a Sweet Tooth challenge, and it wasn’t difficult. 

The other challenge this week was another story.  It was in Chess, a game that I know next to nothing about.   One of my brothers tried to teach me to play Chess many years ago, but I wasn’t too interested in it.  I’ve never really had any other opportunities to learn to play Chess, and it’s something that I’ve never actively wanted to learn.  Pogo has a tutorial, but since I’m under the impression that Chess can’t be learned very easily, I didn’t want to bother with it.

Anyway, the object of the Chess challenge was to win 3,000 tokens.  Unfortunately, it takes a win in Chess to really get a worthwhile number of tokens.  Pogo gives a few tokens to the loser in Chess, but the amount is almost always in the single digits.      

My friend M. won her Chess badge by playing with another person on Pogo who was offering to help anyone who needed it.  Sometimes people on Pogo will help you win your badge if you’ll help them win theirs.  Other people just want to be nice and don’t expect anything in return.  However, I didn’t want to get into in the position of accepting someone else’s help when I couldn’t reciprocate due to my ignorance about Chess.  

So, I played against a robot for awhile, just to see what would happen.  I lost every game (a bunch of them), and managed to creep up to only 100 tokens.  At that rate, it would take me days to win that badge!            

Alexander likes to rib me about my “addiction” to Pogo.com.  When I complained to him the other night that I wasn’t making much progress on my Chess badge, he offered to help me with it, despite the fact that he was working on a job that was due the following morning.  He knows how to play Chess, and he is actually pretty good at it.  I agreed to cook him a batch of fried potatoes and onions while he took a break from his job and worked on my badge.  

He played against robots, won every single game, and finished my badge in about an hour.  Yippee!