Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters
From Badges Wiki
This game is officially retired.
| |
| Status: | Retired |
|---|---|
| Genre: | Trivia |
| Developer: | PAT Productions & Playtonium |
| Publisher: | uclick LLC |
| LTP badge type: | Generic 1 |
| Game version: | Semi-restricted |
| Game length: | 1 board |
| Playable in non-IE browsers: | Yes |
Tips
When guessing on any word, use your keyboard instead of the mouse. If you happen to miss a letter, you can keep on guessing with the keyboard, but not with the mouse.
The order of letters by frequency is: E T A O I N S H R L D C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z. When you are asked to guess 5 letters at the start, type in this sequence in reverse (so you get more points because of more letters missing) until you run out of guesses.
Getting a high score needs some luck. Assuming that you know the answers to all the definitions, the most common letters must come up early as lucky letters, preferably with a higher score, so you have a lot of base points to double in the lucky chance rounds.
Getting puzzles and answers
The game uses the following URL to get its puzzles from:
http://images.ucomics.com/images/patsajakgames/luckyletters/puzzles/patll######-data.xml
where ###### is your system date (for example, 2009 March 28 would convert to 090328).
In the file, the "AllAnswer" element contains the entire board while the "Down" and "Across" elements contain the words in the puzzle along with their definitions.
An alternate solver can be found here: http://kingofknight.com/gyp/pats.php. It displays letters sorted by frequency, the completed board, and the definitions with answers.
Bugs
Sometimes the "Spin Slots" button will be enabled in the 10th round. If you click on it, the round counter will escape the 10 rounds, and there will be no lightning round. However, if you complete the puzzle in this state, you will get "$NaN" points, which means you won't score anything for the game.
To enable the "Spin Slots" button for the 10th round, you must first force-enable the button in the 9th round by typing in a wrong letter (unless the button is already enabled). Then after entering the last correct letter, quickly press spacebar. If the last letter is the lucky one, you must wait for it to finish spreading before pressing spacebar. If you try to do this with the mouse, or by pressing the spacebar while the lucky letter is spreading, the game will end instead of getting to the 10th round.
Other strange effects may also occur if you press "Spin Slots" just after guessing a letter, or while the lucky letter is spread over the puzzle.
In the "Lucky Chance" round, the game will sometimes select a clue where the word has already been completed through the lucky letters from the other clues. Do not wager any money as you won't be able to do anything other than letting your time run out and then you will lose what you bet.
