December 2, 2009: Word Search Daily and BATTLESHIP

The Word Search Daily Challenge

Winter Search Badge
Find 120 words this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens

And as Heidi Klum would say... "One day you're in, and the next day you're out." Last week I had a Play Buddy to help with every challenge and this week *poof*. No Buddies. *sad face*. Anyway... at least this game was fun (in my opinion). Now, on to the challenge details.

Three words: PLAY ON EASY! I started this challenge on medium and while medium provides more words at once, it's not easy finding all of those words and it took a lot of time. On average my puzzles took over 5 minutes when on medium; switching to easy I was breezing through 'em like Super Woman. To solve the puzzle even faster, do what I did: use the HINT feature. You can use the hint (that's right, ya only get one hint for the whole puzzle) and the word will still count towards the badge. I suggest using my strategy of saving the hint until you've solved all but 2 or 3 of the words. If you can't find them in a few short seconds, blast that hint on the shortest word since those are harder to find than longer ones.

PLAYER BEWARE: the "Random" puzzles don't count towards the badge. Unfortunately for me it took a couple of those to figure it out. So, all in all, my 34 minute finish with an extra 1,266 tokens was well done indeed... especially towards the end - I figure I did as well as any bot could on my last few puzzles! ;0)

BATTLESHIP Badge Challenge

Direct Hit! Badge
Get 300 hits this week!
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens

45 minutes into this badge and I realized WHY I LOVE Buddies, and why - if it weren't for them - I'd have pulled out all my hair and quit Pogo games a long time ago! LOL This was a doozie at 1 hour 33 minutes of blasting ships out of the water and receiving a doozie of an extra 6,903 tokens in the process. Thankfully I was playing against the computer robot which is MUCH easier to beat than a human player, and on the basic game (NOT classic which lets you shoot only once per turn... oh goodness that would take years!). Basic math will tell you that if you win the game, you're closer to clearing the 300 hits than if you're losing the game. So definitely DEFINITELY play against the helpful robots for this challenge.

Some strategy for winning: go for the powerup squares on your first move to get an advantage; I placed a hit in 3 different squares, trying to get a powerup AND hit a target simultaneously. Try to get a powerup almost every turn, especially if you're not hitting / sinking targets. BUT SAVE 2 POWERUPS! If things get desperate (i.e. computer sinks 2 of your ships) OR if you're close to winning but can't find the last ship, this is when you hit BOTH powerup squares so that you can get 2 powerups at once which turn into the heat seeking missles (i.e. your sure-fire win).

Oh please Play Buddy... what I want for Christmas is a Battleship Buddy before the next Battleship challenge!