Survivor Tale #7

At some point during saturday I was first approached by some of my fellow players to plot against other fellow players and to form certain alliances. Later, when everybody was expecting the Merge of the teams, I was approached again, in a cautious "think-about-it"-way.
Very interesting.

The Merge happened saturday evening around dinner time. The game master handed out new nice olive-coloured t-shirts and cool black hats to the remaining 10 players (the girls immediately started ripping, uh, modifying their shirts again - it broke my heart). From now on everybody was playing for themselves - no more team work.

The remaining players (using their "Survior names"):
From Purple Team:
James, J.T. , Stephanie, Amber, Sugar, Shambo, Ethan (me).
From Orange Team:
A dude (Rob?) and two blondes (Parvati and ??).

The boys (James & J.T.) had talked to me early on, just to make sure that in case of a purple-vote-off I'd vote one of the girls (Stephanie, Amber) out. I was okay with that, one of them seemed especially dangerous. Therefore I was a bit hesitant later, when one of the girls came to me talking about alliances. I kept my answers vague.
With the Merge looming ahead though, the boys as well as the girls repeatedly spoke of voting the former orange people off one by one in the upcoming challenges. Then later, when we'd be down to pure Purple again, we'd deal with ourselves.
I was fine with that (must be some deeply buried German gene of segregation), and I relayed the information to Shambo. Sugar didn't seem to be interested at all in forming any alliances or voting anybody off - conspiracy communication didn't work well with him.

But we didn't get a chance to vote anybody off that evening, because there was only one challenge left to play that day: The memory-challenge. This one was played for an award, the prize was access to hot coffee, a toothbrush and a shower in the morning.
The challenge works like this: 42 tiles are arranged face down on the ground. Each player can turn over 2 tiles while it is his turn. Every match scores 1 point. The twist: it is not just about matching the symbols, it's about matching the symbol-halfs, because every symbol is not only cut in half, but also depicted twice. Therefore it can happen that two halfs of the same symbol don't match.
The first player to score 4 points wins.

for a hot shower and a cup of coffee

This one was hard, and probably because of the sudden no-team-work-anymore I also found it a bit nerve-racking. I just tried to stay focused and to remember the symbols the others turned over. Especially Shambo and Parvati were pretty good at this game. They both scored multiple points before I even had my first.
At some point I realized I knew two matching tiles everybody else seemed to have missed. Nobody ever turned them over. Neither did I, I just tried to keep them in the back of my head. I went for the obvious ones instead, the near misses of players just before me.
At some point I had scored 3 times already, so had Parvati, Shambo and a couple of other players.
The little yellow thingy on the game field helped me a lot. I kept repeating in my head: 2 over and 1 up from the yellow thing, 2 over and 1 up from the yellow thing...
And when it was my turn again I turned it over and walked to the tile I believed was the match.
It was.

The game-master said: "Ethan wins the challenge!"

Nice! Coffee for me! I didn't want the shower (With the weekend only halfway over, what's the point of getting clean? I'd just get dirty again. Besides, there was always the ocean.) I gave the shower to Parvati.