December 30, 2009: QWERTY and Pop Fu

QWERTY Challenge
Connect Effect Badge
Score a Connection Bonus 2 times this week! (Connect your own letters to your opponent's letters first)
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

I could not believe my luck - whatever was Pogo thinking to gift TWO easy and fast challenges this week?! Wahoo! Of course then again if I wasn't using the amazing Quirty Buddy I probably could have tacked an extra hour or two to my time. BUT lucky for me it was Play Buddy to the rescue and with the help of this stellar auto, I completed the badge in 13 minutes and accumulated 1,955 more tokens. However, I quickly observed a couple of ways to make this time go by tons faster than if I had let the bot autoplay. Here's what I figured out:
When autoplaying the Buddy automatically plops out a word horizontally along the bottom BUT for this particular challenge we want to go up up UP since we have to make connections, and eventually over. So follow these steps:

Step 1: Instead of sticking the Buddy on autoplay, press the "scan" button at the start of your turn.

Step 2: Once the Buddy has scanned the board and your letters, press the "solve" button so the list of available solutions pops up.

Step 3: Click down the list until you find a word going in the direction you want (up up up then to the right), and play it!

Things to consider:

Play against a robot computer because they are faster and easier to beat than another human player (esp if that human happens to be using a bot, too!)
Be careful that you don't use words that are too big until closer to the end of the game / closer to the connection because if you go over the 800 points the game ends. In other words, you want to make the connection FIRST and then get mega words / mega points to end the game AFTER that connection happens.

So that should do it! Follow these guidelines and you're guaranteed to finish the badge as quickly as I did. :)

Pop Fu Badge Challenge
Kung Fu Cactus Badge
Pop 1000 balloons this week! (Balloons popped in the Speed Round do not count. Finish the game to check your progress)
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

One word: WOW! 16 minutes and an additional 2,010 tokens tacked on top of the awarded 2,000 was impressive. Thank you Play Buddy! Aside from recommending the hardest level to pop more balloons at once, I don't have any helpful hints or tips for this challenge. In fact Foo Buddy was so fast and efficient that all ya have to do is turn it on and let it go and presto. Easy breezy (just how I like it!).