December 9, 2009: Lottso! Express and MONOPOLY

The Lottso! Express Challenge

Express Yourself Badge
Reach the fourth goal 6 times this week!
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

Sadly, no Lottso express Play Buddy to be my partner in crime this week (although there is a really awesome Lottso! pogo cheat available). And WHAT A SURPRISE from Pogo! The badge on the game page and badge challenge page says that you need to reach the 4th goal 6 times BUT after exactly 2 HOURS of playing (and 6,178 tokens) later, the green text that displays the progress in the chat room said I had reached 6 out of 15 4th goals! And once you log out of the game and return to the badge area, it says "COMPLETED" after the 6, even though the "badge complete" does not pop up and you don't receive the extra 3,000 bonus tokens. Of course who knows with this Pogo glitch... is it truly completed after 6 or did it suddenly change to 15, I dunno. As I was completing the MONOPOLY badge, Pogo put an announcement of this issue in the chat room but it had not yet been resolved.

At any rate, I did discover that it's helpful to get the big Lottso card early in the game like goal 1 or 2 so you have time to fill it up. It gave over 800 points on average, which is a significant amount more than the single cards which would give me around 60 points on average. HOWEVER it's hard to fill that large card up when you're running out of balls to play, so stick to the single cards later into the game. Also, get at least 1 bonus ball on the single cards so ya get 1.5x extra... do 2 balls if you can spare them since that gives 2x bonus.

BTW, to make things move even faster, start a new game as soon as the green sign pops up saying you've reached the 4th goal; even though you're prompted with a "are you sure you want to start a new game? All of your credit will be lost" your 4th goal accomplishment IS counted towards the badge.

MONOPOLY Badge Challenge

Monopolizing Badge
Roll doubles 15 times this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

The bad news: be prepared to have your butt kicked by robots and watch everyone get doubles except for you!
The good news: this is an easy no-brainer challenge... just requires you to keep clicking "roll" and cross your fingers and hope for the best (and while there isn't a PB Monopoly Buddy yet, I did see one for Monopoly Slots)!

WARNING: even when you make your 15 doubles, do NOT stand up in the middle of the game; Pogo doesn't say this, but the doubles are counted up only at the end of games so you have to complete the entire game even if you get your 15th double on turn 1 of the game like I did (I had to learn the hard lesson... thought "great! Now I'll leave since I know I have 15 doubles!" WRONG!). By learning from my mistake, you'll likely complete the challenge faster than my 1 hour 32 minutes. And if you're really lucky, you'll beat my extra 2,120 tokens too!

Helpful ways to make this challenge go by faster are to:

1. Play against robots (they're much faster than humans)
2. Checkmark "Speedy Dialogs"
3. Buy everything when you land on it (otherwise auction has to transpire)
4. Reject all offers (otherwise have to transpire through that process)