February 24, 2010: Yahtzee Party and First Class Solitaire

Yahtzee Party Badge Challenge
Roll the Hard Six Badge
Roll 6 Yahtzees with 'sixes' this week!
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

If you want to complete this badge as "quickly as possible" (hahaha... ROFL... I use the term lightly considering it took an hour and 20 minutes to get my first which was actually my second but my first didn't count because I already had a Yahtzee in the Yahtzee slot!), click the "Fast Rooms" and then choose the "Wild" rooms, too. Playing in a wild rooms gives higher odds of Yahtzees since wild dice (jokers) are available. At two hours and only 2 Yahtzees, I gave up on this badge - I'll wait for Play Buddy to release a Yahtzee Buddy so I can let it run for the 10+ hours it's going to need. lol!

First Class Solitaire Badge Challenge
First to Board Badge
Complete 12 foundations this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

Even with Class First Buddy and an extra 2,806 tokens, the 32 minutes it took to complete this challenge seemed to take forever (but of course is nothing compared to the Yahtzee challenge)! The first two wins (8 stacks) happened within 10 minutes and then waiting for the final win (final 4 stacks) took all the rest of the time. This is a very tricky game that requires a lot of strategy and could really drive ya bonkers if you try to think about it too much so my personal advice is to turn on the Buddy and let it run!

February 17, 2010: Word Search Daily and Boggle Bash

Word Search Daily Badge Challenge
Pretty Word Badge
Find 20 'Gift Words' this week! (Gift Words appear with letters missing on the word list. Progress granted for replaying completed puzzles)
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

Playing manually I completed the badge and acquired 3,496 extra tokens in 44 minutes. If you follow these guidelines, your time will probably be faster:

1. Open Word Search Daily and make sure that the difficulty level is set to "easy"
2. Press the "new game" and "random" until you see a word in blue appear (the "gift word") on your word list
3. Even if the bottom of the puzzle has a message saying "This Game Does Not Count Towards Earning a Badge", this message is INCORRECT in this case: as soon as I finished the puzzle, it gave me credit for the blue gift word.
4. Refer to my previous Word Search Daily badge post here for helpful puzzle-solving advice and tips.

Some tidbits I learned are to NOT USE HINT on the blue gift word because you will NOT receive credit for it. If you can't figure out what the blue word is immediately, just look for the most consecutive letters in the puzzle. For example, if it says c_ard, look for "ard" in the puzzle and voila.

BOGGLE Bash Challenge
Bashful Badge
Find 100 words that do NOT contain the letter 'e' this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

Hello gorgeous! When I originally opened Boggle Buddy it was plain 'ol Jane and now the updated version that works with the black bar is a total makeover! Very nice. Okay, so on to the more important stuff...

You can let it autoplay and just walk away and eventually it will get the badge. If you want to really speed things up, you can do what I did: I double clicked on all the words in the Buddy's word list that did not have "e"s in them (really nice when one puzzle didn't have an e in it!). A few minutes of the 12 (that's right - only TWELVE minutes... and 665 extra tokens!) it took to complete the challenge were spent waiting for the time to run out and the next round to begin so you'll definitely finish this up in no time by playing manually with the bot as a helper.

February 10, 2010: Hog Heaven Slots and Sweet Tooth 2

Hog Heaven Slots Challenge
Wingin' It Badge
Collect 30 halos this week!
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

It's badges like this that make me so excited and thankful for Play Buddy! Instead of spending the 2 hours (exactly 2 hours!) clicking a mouse button non-stop, I just downloaded Hog Heaven Buddy and hit "autoplay" and away it went - and away I went to grab some lunch! So aside from just letting the bot run and checking in on it every so often, there isn't really anything else I can say to make this challenge go by smoother or faster. One cool thing: I hit the jackpot a few times because in addition to the 3,000 tokens for the badge, the Buddy snagged an extra 22,995!!!!! Now if only I could nab that kind of luck in real life...


Sweet Tooth 2 Challenge
Holey Molar Badge
Match 3000 pieces of candy this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

Thank you Play Buddy for the sweeeeeeet TootSweet Buddy! I downloaded this bot and had it play caramel on level 5 because you get more pieces and takes longer to clear all the caramel squares which is good because a) you get more matches and b) the less amount of "downtime" (i.e. jackpot spins and end of game scoring, etc) the faster it goes! That said, this badge was the heavenly one compared to Hog Heaven... only took 25 minutes. Of course I only got an additional 2,223 tokens too. Even so, I think I prefer the shorter time anyway. :-)

This might be helpful info for some: running out of time does NOT matter - any matches you made still count regardless of whether or not the time runs out. Also, you have to wait until the end of the round to get credit. This means that you have to wait for either your time to run out, or until you successfully complete the round.

February 3, 2010: Puck's Peak and Perfect Pair Solitaire

Perfect Pair Badge Challenge
Hearts on Fire Badge
Visit 7 ports this week! (Reach 7 spaces marked with a star on the game board)
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

This was pretty tricky since Perfect Pair Buddy does not know how to land exactly on a star (that's right: to get this badge you have to land directly on top of a star space, not just pass it!). So I would help the bot by counting how many spaces it was to the next star and if it were, say 6, I'd "guide" the Buddy to get 6 hearts during the game. HOW? Well that was tricky and it's tricky to explain. But basically I had to use common sense and deduce / estimate at the beginning and during the game when to allow the bot to do "perfect pairs" (matching the couple directly across from one another which gives a full heart immediately) and when to use the K heartbreak cards to keep from getting another heart. Once again this requires use of the HINT options so conveniently displayed on the Buddy. Otherwise if you let it autoplay, it'll get too many or too few hearts.

Whew! Well I know that is kind of difficult to understand, but once you start playing you'll see what I mean and pick it up. Good luck! And may you finish faster than I - it took me an hour and 17 minutes but towards the end when I figured out a good routine, I landed on the stars back-to-back-to-back which wrapped things up quickly and finished up with an extra 3,886 tokens.

Puck's Peak Badge Challenge
Mountain Climbing Badge
Reach 30 checkpoints this week! (Checkpoints appear every 100 meters)
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

At 1 hour and 11 minutes this badge was another long one to complete (and not very rewarding: only an extra 1,088 tokens) since Play Buddy didn't have an auto. Thankfully I had never played this before so once I figured out that it was a glorified Tetris, it was just a matter of stack, stack, stacking away 'til I hit the marker. It's a lot easier if you're Rank 1 because the game is easier to play since the pieces are blocky. The last 10 of my checkpoints had to be aquired at the next rank and it was noticeably harder and therefore more time consuming (harder because the blocks turn into strange shapes). A pretty captivating game overall though - the hour I played seemed like no time at all!

A tip you might find helpful is to play the 1,000 meter game since you can complete more checkpoints without reaching a new rank (ranks are given after the round is completed), and you only need to build up and the pieces don't have to fit perfectly together. Just keep stacking things on top of eachother - make sure they're sound and stable though... no wobbles! - and you'll reach the levels faster than if you try to neatly fit every piece together like you have to do in Tetris.