March 7, 2012: Tri-Peaks Solitaire & Texas Hold'em Poker

Tri-Peaks Solitaire Badge Challenge

Tomb of Kings Badge
Earn 3500 tokens this week! (Earn a Jackpot Spin to check your progress)
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

While this game can be fun to play, I'm so glad Tripeak Buddy is available for badges like this since the only way to earn tokens is to complete games and 3,500 tokens is a LOT of games. That said, here's the stats:

Game Difficulty: No difficulty - played against computer
Buddy Settings: Default
Tokens: 6,317 tokens earned
Time: 1 hour 14 minutes
NOTES: Basically just have to play the game (or let the Buddy do it), and hope Pogo smiles upon you to give you favorable card placement.

Texas Hold'em Poker Badge Challenge

Urban Cowgirl Badge
Win 13 Hands with Two Pair or better this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

If you're like me and poker is just not your game, then you can earn the badge like me too (use Texas Holdem Buddy). I'm not a good judge about how fast or slow this game can be won, but here's how the Buddy did:

Game Difficulty: No difficulty - played against computer under "Limit" / "Just for Fun"
Buddy Settings: Default
Tokens: 2,330 tokens earned
Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
NOTES:As far as I could tell the same amount of time will pass regardless of type of room chosen, although if you don't want to risk losing a lot of tokens (like me), play against robots under the 'limit' and 'just for fun' tabs just to be safe.

April 28, 2010: Tri-Peaks Solitaire & Flower Daze

Tri-Peaks Solitaire Badge Challenge
Sneak Peak Badge
Clear 250 peaks this week! (Peaks are the 3 top cards in each hand)
Win this badge plus 3000 Tokens!

This one was a DOOZIE! Even though there is a Tripeak Buddy, I completed this challenge solo because I have Vista and - as the download page attests - it was buggy to the point of not working so I struck out on my own. This was a whopping feat that took me just short of 3 hours 30 minutes, and a bunch 'o extra tokens (8,533). Throughout my journey I learned some tidbits that could help other players:

• Always look for the up AND down cards. Example: showing a 4; can choose a 3 or 5


• Then choose the longest chain which could be a combo of going up and down Example: showing a 4, with a 3,3,4,4,5 on board so you can have a chain of 4,3,4,3,4,5.


• And make sure to select the card that will uncover more cards UNLESS it's at the very top where you can either uncover a card or finish a peak, in which case finishing a peak is preferable (unless you're card counting and know that you can do both).


• Save wilds until you have 0 or only 1 peak in a game, and can use the wild card to obtain an extra peak.

Flower Daze Badge Challenge
Flower Power Badge
Convert 2500 orange flowers this week!
Win this badge plus 2000 Tokens!

This one seemed very easy (and short) compared to the Tri-Peaks challenge - I completed it manually in 52 minutes with an additional 3,244 tokens.

The instructions weren't very clear on how to play this game. Basically you have flowers with numbers in them at the bottom of your screen. That means you can move to that colored flower on the game board, that many times. In short: select any of the difficulty levels until an ORANGE flower appears on the game window, and start clicking on anything that lights up!

Sometimes after a game is completed, no orange flowers will appear. So keep hitting "new game" or change the difficulty level and they will eventually reappear.

And a final sweet note... the great fact about this badge is that you DON'T have to WIN the game in order to get credit. :)