May 12, 2010: Deuces Wild & Thousand Island Solitaire

Thanks to Play Buddy this week was very easy: it was a "download a Buddy and GO" week (yay!). That said, both of these challenges were completed on auto-pilot without any hangups so I don't have much to offer as far as hints or tips.

Double Deuce Poker Badge Challenge
Pair of Deuces Badge
Get a Two Pair or better 100 times this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

Double Deuce Buddy earned me an extra 1,980 tokens and the badge in 26 minutes.

Thousand Island Solitaire Badge Challenge
Floating Chest Badge
Get a 'Perfect 1000' on 100 piles this week! (Play Distance cards to make a pile add up to exactly 1000)
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

Island Sol Buddy wasn't too shabby, either; this Buddy received my badge and an extra 5,530 tokens in 1 hour 37 minutes (on average, that's less than 1 minute per pile). NOTE: Be sure to select the "Only Score 1,000" option from the Buddy's menu so that it capitalizes on achieving the badge faster.

January 27, 2010: Mahjong Safari, Thousand Island Solitaire, and SCRABBLE

Mahjong Safari Badge Challenge
Tile Tree Badge Badge
Make 30 5X combos this week! (10X combos count double and 15X combos count triple)
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

MahjSaf Buddy is so cute and such a good player. I wondered if the difficulty level would give more or less combos and I found that the easy gives 6 and the normal gives 7 so I would assume hard gives 8 or 9 but why have the bot waste time working harder than it needs to when it can complete the levels lickity-split on easy? Actually this badge would have been completed faster than my 6 minutes if I wasn't investigating this! LOL! (and BTW I got an extra 1,378 tokens in that short amount of time!). Anyway, that's part of my curiosity and if I can find something helpful then it's worth it. :) In short: nothing difficult or crazy about this quick challenge.

Thousand Island Solitaire Badge Challenge
Captain's Log Badge
Play 200 Distance cards this week! (Distance cards have numbers like 25, 50 or 75 on them)
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

An amazingly similar situation as Mahjong Safari. Bottom line: just let it run! Thankfully IslandSol Buddy doesn't have to WIN the game, it only has to FINISH the game to get credit for the distance cards. This was all wrapped up in 13 minutes, with an additional 1,616 tokens. Easy Breezy.

SCRABBLE Badge Challenge
Scrabble Rousers Badge
Create 30 5-letter words this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

This challenge attested to my brilliance and stupidity. How so? Well, allow me to elaborate.

Play Buddy doesn't have Scrabble Buddy (unfortunately) BUT I do remember Quirty Buddy and that you can enter letters into Quirty Buddy's GUI and use the solve feature to generate a list of words (dang I'm smart!)!!! WAHOO! Sure it's not as fabulous as an autoplayer but ya gotta admit it's pretty dang cool (love Play Buddy's one-of-a-kind features!!!) and certainly better than no help at all! <--- BRILLIANCE

However, one hour in I realize that I'm not receiving credit for my 5+ letter words and I realize that the words have to be EXACTLY FIVE LETTERS! So in other words, all my fancy 6 and 7 letter words I was proudly entering, DON'T COUNT! <--- STUPIDITY

So once I figured that out, I used the "solve" AND the 5-letter word filter on the Buddy and then it only took me 21 minutes to get my remaining 18 5-letter words. ALSO you have to FINISH the game completely to get credit for the words so make sure to play it all the way to the end.

And there it is. Hopefully you can glean from my brilliance and attain some wisdom from my stupidity and finish this badge more efficiently (and with more than an extra 1,060 tokens) than myself.