Casual Clicking for Fun and Profit by ellienib
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There are many reasons why you might be trying to kill time on Neopets. Perhaps you’re waiting for a shop to restock, or for new Kadoaties to beg for expensive foods, or for your Neofriend to answer a message. Maybe you really want to increase your odds of receiving a Faerie Quest as you chase that elusive FFQ. Maybe you’re waiting for someone to respond to your Neoboard post or place an offer on your trade. Maybe you’re looking to come across some good random events that might bring you a valuable item. You may be wondering how to best use that spare time and get value and enjoyment from it… I’ve got a few suggestions! Pyramids: This card game is easy to learn and fun to strategize. You’re not going to get rich from this game alone, with its 5000 NP daily cap, but I receive on average at least double the 50 NP fee per game. Plus, you can win trophies by clearing certain numbers of pyramids! My advice: look at all of the available cards and make sure you choose moves that will clear the largest number and/or free up the card above it. Sakhmet Solitaire: Like Pyramids, this card game also has a 5000 NP daily cap and is pretty fun and easy to learn. In this game, I tend to earn less per average round (it’s quite possible to get 0 NP if you get unlucky with the aces), but I find I have a higher chance of completing the game than Pyramids. Apparently you can also win prizes by winning games, but I’ve never had this happen to me, so take this with a grain of salt! My advice: focus first on moving cards from the rows into stacks in order to reveal the cards under them. Once you’ve made all of those moves, then you can look at the drawn card and use it accordingly. Dice-a-Roo: This is one of my favorite games for low buy-in cost (just 5 NP per round), maximal clicking, and the potential to win items. Once you make it to the green die, you can win food items, and you have the chance to win lottery tickets with the yellow die! You can also win an avatar by collecting the jackpot. My advice: wait until the jackpot has reached a decently high number (at least 2000 NP or more) before starting to play. There’s nothing more disappointing than winning the jackpot but only getting a couple hundred Neopoints! Fetch!: This game can be quite frustrating, especially when it seems like the path to get to the item is completely inaccessible. But if you’re willing to stick it out, you can enjoy a decent reward at the end. My advice: play on Hard until you acquire the 1000 points needed to play the Fiendish difficulty, which awards a minimum of 1500 points per game. Don’t forget that the exit is always on the opposite wall from where you started! Cheat!: This game is a quadruple whammy: trophies, avatar, petty cash, and items! Sure, you win a couple hundred NP with each round, but you can also rack up some additional NP by catching players cheating… which happens quite a lot! Plus, with every victory, you earn a Battlecard, which are currently quite valuable for donation-based events due to their high rarity. My advice: if you have no cards at the range played by the opponent immediately before you and you’re worried about getting automatically called out for cheating since you’re down to just a few cards, call cheat on that opponent first! Either you’re wrong, in which case you take hopefully not too many cards and still get to lay down cards that turn, or you’re right, in which case you make a little money and get to pick a card range that you have cards in for your turn. It’s amazing how often an opponent will cheat even when they get to pick the card range. Neoquest: It wouldn’t be a complete list of turn-based games that involve a lot of clicking without including Neoquest. This game is best enjoyed as a marathon rather than a sprint, and you’d be amazed at how much progress you can make through it by spending a few minutes at a time battling and exploring. You win a pittance in comparison to the work involved when leveling up or defeating certain opponents, but the true value lies in your ability to earn an avatar and trophy. My advice: find a good guide and follow their strategy! I like investing points into Shock and Spectral skills. Neoquest II: With multiple avatars, trophies, and decently valuable prizes at the Insane difficulty level, Neoquest II is another game with enough variety to keep you playing. My advice: To be honest, I know I must have completed this game since I have the bronze trophy, but I have absolutely no memory of it, for good or bad. Find a good guide and have fun! Cellblock: This game has a steep learning curve and can get mind-numbing once you figure out your best strategy and just plug and chug most of the games. But you can easily max out on the 5000 NP per day limit and make steady progress towards the avatar and trophies. My advice: find a maneuver that sets you up to make two converging rows of three pieces, so your opponent is forced to block one of them and the other row is free to be completed. Use your opponent’s greed against them and keep your rows to two pieces until you’ve got the key parts in position! Snow Wars: This is not the same game as the dreaded Snow Wars II that is the bane of my existence! Snow Wars is one part strategy, three parts luck, especially when it comes to finding the single-square snowmen. You can win a trophy from this game and each victory earns you a couple of snowballs, which can be quite valuable at the last couple of levels. My advice: if you move on from a partially-discovered target to try to find the more elusive targets, don’t forget to check your map closer to the end! One of my most painful games was one where I lost against a difficult opponent because I’d left one square untouched on a target and forgot about it. Out of all of the games on this list, this probably ranks the lowest on my “fun” score because of how infuriatingly luck-based it is, but it’s still a good one to get some clicks in if you want the trophy. Sewage Surfer: Another game you’re probably not going to play more than once or twice for the avatar and trophy, but this game is more strategy-based and entertaining to play. My advice: find a level-by-level guide to help you if you get stuck, but it’s more fun to think about how you might try to solve it first! Scorchy Slots: This game is one of the best ones in this list to actually make a decent amount of money. Beyond the NP prizes you can get for matching fruits (usually not too impressive, but it adds up over time), you can win Treasure Map pieces if you get lucky with your pulls! My advice: when I get the option to save icons for the next roll, I save the Treasure Map icon(s) first, then high-value icons in a good position, then leave it open for fate. If you are extremely lucky and get multiple holds in a row, you might be able to get multiple prizes! I hope this article has given you some inspiration for ways to have more fun and work towards your goals during your spare time. Good luck chasing down Jacko and the Fountain Faerie!
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