When I was a kid, we used to do a lot of puzzles and play a lot of board games, and we also got Games Magazine.  It had all sorts of puzzles, but one kind I never did was the cryptic crosswords.  The clues seemed like gibberish and were way too hard, like they were designed for super-geniuses or something, and I couldn’t get the hang of them at all.  To make matters worse, unlike a normal crossword where each letter belongs to two words, one across and one down; in most cryptics, only about half the letters are “crossed” (see picture).  So even if you get all the across words, you still only have half the letters of the down words.

A few years ago, I happened upon a stack of those old magazines and started going through them looking for unfinished puzzles to do.  Since the cryptic crosswords were still completely unmarked, I gave them another try, and something just seemed to click this time.  I know I’m not any smarter, so maybe the convoluted nature of the clues was just too complex for a kid.  I don’t know why it took so long, but now they’re one of my favorite types of puzzle. Read more »

I got my first computer pretty late in life, compared to most people in the business. I gazed longingly at the Commodore systems in the Sears catalog as a kid, but hundreds of dollars for what was basically a toy at the time wasn’t even conceivable. Once I got out on my own and didn’t have anyone around to tell me to be sensible with my money, I hustled down to Sears and spent around $700-800 on a Commodore 128DCR. I didn’t have a printer, so I really couldn’t do anything productive with it. (Nor did I have anything productive to do.) There was no Internet to speak of then outside colleges and military bases, and no home computer software to access it anyway. There was an online service specifically for Commodores called Q-Link, but I couldn’t afford the long distance charges from my small town.

What I could afford was blank disks, and I had Commodore-owning friends with lots of games; so for the few years before I got online, my 128DCR was a glorified C64 game machine. But what wonderful games they were. My current computer has 5600 times the CPU speed and 15,625 times the memory, but I haven’t found many modern games more enjoyable than the ones made for that slow, primitive system. We waited minutes for games to load, we fought with poor interfaces and buggy software, we listened to screechy sound effects, and we got stuck on games because there were no walk-throughs and Internet forums to get help from. But they were fun. Modern games blow them away in audio, graphics, and complexity; but often they forget to be fun.

M.U.L.E. was one of the funnest. It’s the only game I remember that let all four players play simultaneously during some parts, two with joysticks and two with portions of the keyboard. The back-story was that four colonists were dropped on the planet Irata, and would be using Multiple Use Labor Elements (MULEs, basically robots) to mine plots of land for food, energy, smithore (used for making more MULEs) and crystite (a mineral worth lots of money). There were 12 turns representing 12 months. On each turn you could buy plots of land, buy MULEs and send them to develop plots, assay plots for crystite, buy and sell goods at the central store, and hunt the mountain wampus, a beast that would pay to be released if you caught it.

At the end of twelve months the colony ship returned, and the colonist with the most stuff was the winner. A nice twist, though, was that the game praised the winner based on the total wealth of the colony. So winning by stomping the other colonists wasn’t as rewarding as winning while everyone else prospered too. The game was created by the late Dani Bunten, who wanted to create a non-violent game that encouraged cooperation but was still fun and competitive. Judging by how many times we played it in the middle of the night after work, despite the 2-3 minute load time and the fact that a 4-human game could take a few hours, it succeeded in those goals.

I still fire it up occasionally in a C64 emulator and play against three computer players, and it’s still fun. They aren’t all that smart, though—AI hadn’t really come very far in those days at one million instructions per second—so they’re easy to beat. There have been attempts to remake the game for online multiplayer, but they always seem to die out. I’ve been kicking the idea of a truly turn-based web version around in my head for about a year now, and I think I’ve worked out the basic structure of it, but we’ll see if I ever get the time and ambition to actually do it. I was starting to think I’d do it in Java, but Jason says Java still stinks, so that’s disappointing. Thinking about doing it all via HTTP makes my head hurt, but maybe it’s doable. It’d sure be fun to be able to play against three real people again—and if I don’t have to huddle around a keyboard with three other drunk guys to do it, so much the better!

After I wrote my Mahjong Safari Strategy Guide, I got to wondering how the different boards really did compare. (If you’re not interested in this game or nerdy statistics, sorry, come back tomorrow.) Certain ones seemed better for scoring than others, but subjective impressions are often unreliable. Real numbers aren’t, so I kept track of my scores for a while. I only kept track of ten games on each board, so it’s not a very large sample, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

(Click the graph on the right to see it full-sized.) There’s a blue square for each score, and the line represents the averages. As you can see, there were big differences between the different layouts. Some things I guessed right about: the three highest scoring boards were three with long straight spaces through the layout. HH and Jail are also that way, though, and they didn’t score as well. They’re just a bit more congested than the others. I was surprised to see Eye so high. In retrospect I realize that it’s not as congested as it looks; if you get a few pieces cleared out of the center, it opens up quickly. Desert is the same way: a couple of early breaks make it much easier. Lightbulb was the biggest surprise; I didn’t think I did that well on it at all.

I was surprised to see Windows so low; that’s one of my favorites to play, and I thought I usually did pretty well at it. Not so much, it turns out, in these ten tries anyway. The 4-5 worst ones are all very poor for scoring, and you can see that the first three resulted in a lot of “stuck” games that weren’t possible to finish at all. If you’re looking for high scores and plenty of Pogo tokens, you should probably skip those first five every time they come up. To really maximize your scores, stick with the top three layouts and just mix in some of the others for variety.

Here’s my strategy guide for getting high scores on Mahjong Safari, a game at pogo.com in the Puzzle Games section.  I got hooked on it recently, and when I looked for tips on playing it, I didn’t find much, so here’s my contribution.  (Yes, this may be the most frivolous thing I’ve ever blogged.)

The game is simple and addicting.  It’s a variant of the usual solitare mahjong, where you match tiles to remove them until you clear the board.  In this case, you can remove any two matching tiles which can be connected by a line with two right angles or fewer.  Most boards can be cleared, so the task becomes clearing it in the way that gives you the most points (and thus the most tokens to spend on winning prizes).

The most important thing is: forget about speed.  The bonus for finishing in under three minutes is only 30 tokens; and, as you’ll see, you can easily gain more than that by taking your time.  The bonus multiplier that increases when you match pairs quickly is also not worth worrying about.  My base score, the points given for matches, including the multipliers for speed, always falls somewhere in the 7000-10,000 range.  Since that’s divided by 100 for your reward in tokens, that’s a range of 30 tokens: not worth rushing and missing a different kind of bonus.  So take your time and pick the best possible matches.  When you have a few lined up, or when you get to the end and there are no more bonus matches available, then by all means rip through them quickly and get what speed points you can out of them.

Mahjong Safari Game Summary

The key to high scores is combo matches.  A combo is when there are four matching tiles on the board, and you match two of them and then immediately match the other two within about one second.  If you succeed, the game will display the name of the animal matched below the board.  Each combo is worth 30 tokens, so just two combos will more than make up for taking your time and missing the speed bonuses.  I typically score 5-12 combos in a game, depending on the lay of the tiles, so that really ramps up the totals.  In the game summary shown here, I scored 13 combos for 390 bonus tokens, so I didn’t mind missing the time bonus one bit!

So concentrate on finding opportunities to match all four tiles of one animal at once, and match those sets as soon as you find them.  Make sure you don’t pause in between; you only have about a second between the two pairs.

To increase the number of combos you can match, you’ll also want to clear out the animals that only appear twice.  You can’t score a combo on those, so you might as well match them and get them out of the way as soon as possible. Match the stars and “Pogo” tiles as soon as possible too.  There are four of each of those, but they don’t give a combo bonus, so don’t bother trying to get them as a group.  Just make sure, if three stars or “Pogo” tiles are free and the fourth is buried, that you match the two that will free up the most other tiles.

You’ll soon notice that some animals, like the wolf, always appear four times; while some, like the cardinal, only appear twice.  A few, like the starfish, sometimes appear twice and sometimes four times, depending on how many tiles the layout needs.  Becoming familiar with which creatures are always or never potential combos will help you quickly see which pairs can be matched without missing a bonus.

Use the powerups sparingly, if at all.  Since the powerups cost 30 tokens each use, using them will bring down the high scores we’re shooting for.  Never use the Hint powerup; the game will tell you if you have more matches available, so just look around until you find them.  Use the long-line powerup if by using it you can free up two or more combos.  Otherwise, don’t use the powerups unless the game tells you you’re out of matches and it’s the only way to continue.  Generally, a game that gets that tight won’t produce a high score anyway.

The distance between each set of matched tiles determines how many points you get for it, so when you’re matching two pairs for a combo, if they are spread out, match them such that they are as far apart as possible.  If there are two way over on the left and two way over on the right, don’t match the left two and then the right two.  Match one on the left to one on the right, and then the other two, if possible.  In many cases, you won’t have a choice, because of other tiles in the way, and that’s okay.  The most important thing is to score the combo, but if you have a chance to score a little extra for distance in the process, do it.

In the upper left corner, there is a chest on which you can click to try out some alternate tiles.  If some of these are more eye-catching for you, trading them for designs that are hard to spot can make things easier and help keep you from missing combos.  I had a hard time spotting some of the light yellow critters like the ray and kangaroo without hunting for them, so trading them for tiles like the bright red ladybug helped a lot.

This last one is a bit of a cheat, so use it at your own discretion.  Every time you match ten pairs of the special “safari” animals, of which there are four pairs per game on Hard difficulty, you get a bonus of 100 tokens.  So if you have at least six of the special pairs already, and you get a board that doesn’t look promising, you may want to hit New Game until you get one you like better.  There’s no penalty for quitting a board, so finding one you like can help you put that 100 tokens with a good game for a big score.  (You also get a Jackpot spin at that point, but Jackpot tokens aren’t added to your score in the high score list that everyone sees.)

Crossroads Layout

Some of the boards are much more combo-friendly than others.  The best ones are the ones with long straight open areas, so there are a lot of possible matches right from the start, like Crossroads, 5 or S, and Thick Spiral.  Second best are Windows and Big Office Building, which have the spaces spread out evenly so a few matches can open things up quickly.  Worst are the ones with the empty space clumped together, with Light Bulb being the worst.  Compare these two boards and see how many more matching possibilities there are in Crossroads.  So if you’re shooting for a high score in the 600+ range, and you’re expecting that Safari bonus of 100 points to help out, you might skip the hard boards like Lightbulb or Whale and find a friendlier one like Crossroads.

Light Bulb Layout

Well, those are all my strategy tips. Using these ideas, I’d say I score over 500 tokens on at least half my games.  Hope they help, and if you have any tips of your own, please add them in the comments!