I started playing RollerCoin the other day. It's basically a crypto-mining simulator game, you participate in events and play minigames to earn miners, which you then stage on racks and get them to passively mine for you. I'll be doing up another article soon with some beginner tips and things I wish I knew when I started but honestly it's pretty hard to screw anything up so I figured I'd drop this article first since the minigames really are the core part of the game you'll be interacting with a la Wario Ware or Mario Party.
If you haven't signed up already, you can use my referral code and we both get a little bonus.
Basically, RollCoin offers a varied set of minigames that you can use to grind for parts and batteries that you can sell for RLT (RollerToken) along with other bonus coins like DOGE, XRT, POL and TRX. Some are simple brain games like Coin Flip or Coin Match and others like Lambo Rider or Token Blaster are pure twitch gameplay. In all cases the descriptions and instructions leave a little to be desired, and in some there is just about zero explanation of reasonably complex mechanics or win conditions.
Now that I've got a handle on each of them, I thought I might go through them with my thoughts and strategies, and clear up any confusion on how they work.
Especially since I couldn't find anything like this when I searched myself.
Crypto Hex
Case in point, Crypto Hex. The game starts you with three piles of chips and an empty board, and doesn't tell you anything about what to do with them. First time through I laid down a random pile expecting one of those hamsters to go next.
They did not.
Turns out what you need to do is create stacks of ten or more to clear them off the board. Placing a colored token next to another one will cause them to combine, so in a perfect world you will want two medium sized stacks of the same color separated by an empty cell so you could drop a third stack in the middle and have them all combine for a 15 or 16 count instead of just 10.
As the difficulty increases, stacks will become mixed, and more colors will be introduced but the strategy is the same: clear the biggest stacks possible to hit the score within the time limit.
Coinclick
Hard on the wrists, points scale terribly and one mistake and it's over. Coin hits the ground? Dead. Click on a bomb, double dead.
Seems like it would be a lot easier on a touch screen but the tiny hit boxes on the coins can be difficult to hit with the mouse. While fullscreen mode helps a lot here, this is never going to be my favorite and always gets left out of smaller rotations.
Higher levels are actually easier in a way, more bombs means more time between clicks which can help a lot if you start falling behind. But I guess the value scales accordingly: Level 1 starts at 1200, Level 5 is something like 1420. (The best value game, Mission Hamspossible goes 7000 at 1 to 12000 at 5)
Dr.Hamster
There's a reason Tetris is one of the best selling games of all time, and it's not because your average Russian had a large amount of spare rubles to throw around on videogames in 1985. It's because it's unbelievable addictive, and has the coveted 'easy to learn, hard to master' aspect that many of the world's greatest games have. Doctor Mario may not be Tetris, but it still sold 10 Million copies, and Dr.Hamster is a pretty faithful adaptation of it.
Essentially you have one job: Clear the bad guys. While you can run up the score just making and collapsing sets of four, you instantly win the match once you clear all of the initial spawns. What this means in practical terms is that you can very commonly get sub 10 second runs if you ignore anything but the baddies. This is always my first pick unless I'm doing a full set or focusing down a specific game for a daily quest.
Coin-match
A classic match-three game in the vein of Bejeweled, Snood or Candy Crush, this can actually be the fastest game in the whole set if you get super lucky with your first cascade on the lower levels.
Match three of a single token to clear them, a set of four clears the entire row or column, and a set of five clears every instance of that token which can be pretty massive.
On higher levels, new tokens are added but while the score threshold grows it always seems to give you plenty of time to make your combos. I honestly don't know if I've ever had a loss on this one. Easy pick for a short one on quicker visits.
Token Surfer: Snow Ride
You're a hamster on a snowboard, who doesn't need to go down a hill to move, which isn't even the most unrealistic thing about this scenario.
It's also christmas, and for some reason Christmas related stuff kills you.
At least the coins have an oversized hit box. It's very difficult to miss them even if you don't appear to touch them. Unfortunately the obstacles also seem to have the same thing, meaning you must give everything a very wide berth to be safe.
The trees, snowmans, present piles, sleighs and department store display cabinets (?!) are all deadly obstacles. The signposts and the streetlights with the bows are not. The bird is an obstacle although you can bounce off of it, which would of course be impossible to do off a sturdy, flat-topped, snow encrusted display cabinet like the one shown in this screenshot. Land on top of that, you die. At higher levels the game starts taking forever as the point thresholds become higher -- but never high enough to make this a must-play on every rota.
Token Blaster
A little Space Invaders clone that amps up the difficulty fast.
Reds take one shot to kill, greens take 2, whites take 3 and so on. You will absolutely need the special weapons pickups to clear later difficulties, even if it means taking a hit to collect them.
Try and keep an even distribution of guys across the board, a random creature fires a bullet every x seconds, and if you have a tight bunch of 4 in the corner and none anywhere else they'll just be raining fire and you won't be able to line up a shot. Having them all arrayed in a nice line also helps get more value from the spread-fire weapon when it drops since you won't have a bunch of shots going into empty space. Takes a longer time than most games, but is on the high end value wise for points and a decent challenge.
Coin Fisher
Easy to pick up, annoying to play. Your rod goes so. Damn. Slow.
Cast and collect coins, try and hit the score threshold before the timer runs out. This game would be a lot better is it actually showed the score threshold -- you can check before you enter if you remember to expand the game card in the choose games screen.
Easy skip, but not terrible in gauntlet/progression rotations, and half decent value.
Hamster Climber
This game is so stupid but I love it. If i'm only playing a couple games this is gonna be pick #2 every time after Dr.Hamster, mainly because you want to get the levels up ASAP.
It starts out pretty slow, but it's a whole different game once you go up a couple difficulty tiers and they start swinging at high speed. I just love watching those little bastards swing around on their little ropes.
Super twitch game at high speed, super simple, decent payout.
Flappy Rocket
I missed the Flappy Bird craze, which has seemingly been all but forgotten now. This game is kinda perfect here though in the middle of the road for length, difficulty and value.
Relatively quick, relatively painless and relatively short.
The best thing it has going for it is that losing a life doesn't set you back at all, so if you know the target score and the point value of each marker, you can win by crashing into the last pillar for a dramatic finish.
Mission Hamspossible
This game looks really wonky at first but is 100% worth figuring out as it has the highest point values of any of the games by a long shot. Level 1 starts at 7000 points increasing by 1000 every level.
It's also incredibly easy once you know how to play it (which is probably why the game neglects to explain it to you) and can result in sub-ten-second runs if the board is nicely set up.
Basically that laser pans up and down (or side to side) and you have to avoid getting killed by it. You can teleport two spaces forward on a long cooldown to jump the laser or an empty space and the laser won't touch the top 3 rows (or left 3 if laser is vertical).
To win, you collect the large boxes; you do not need to collect the small boxes. The small boxes are incredibly handy though, as they completely stop the laser for a short amount of time.
Crypto Hamster
Wow. Man oh man I just hate everything about this game. The game starts you off bouncing, regardless of whether there's actually anything to bounce on -- which means you can just straight up die before you have a chance to even guess at the game mechanics. Essentially, you need to get to the target altitude (marked by the line with the flag on the right side of the screen) before the timer runs out. Or more likely are killed.
Touching enemies kills you, and most of the time you don't get a chance to even see them before you're bounced into them, although if you get lucky you can bounce on top of them to kill them. Once you get the hang of it, it's not terrible. It's reasonably short, it's reasonably easy, and it has one of the highest point values.
It's just incredibly offensive.
Two quick tips: 1) You pretty much want to always be hammering on space bar to shoot your stupid little gun on the off chance an alien is above you. 2) The game wraps horizontally, so if you go offscreen to the left you'll come out on the right or vice versa. Very handy for impossible looking layouts/jumps.
2048 Coins
The hardest game in here. Taking the already incredibly difficult puzzling of 2048/Threes and abstracting away the numbers turns this game into utter nonsense.
The way it works is basically this. You have you two "1's" and you merge them together to make a "2". Then merge two "2's" to make a "4" and so on. Every time you move, a random new tile is generated. Fill the board with unmovable tiles and you die.
Now instead of using easily identifiable numbers with a clear visual hierarchy, we'll use Tokens that represent each number.
Thanks to the extremely punishing timer, you will rarely die from board overflow as you will time out well before that point. Beyond Level 4 this game is practically impossible, and even if you do manage to complete a Level 4 board, it's worth a paltry 1600 points.
Cryptonoid
Classic breakout with Fireball, Sticky Ball, and Lasers but no Multi-Ball. And no keyboard control, which is a bizarre choice, this would be a ton more fun with more precise controls.
One of the hardest games in the suite, especially at later levels where blocks take multiple hits to break. Very unforgiving timer.
And while the games are long and difficult, the point value is also very high, second only to Hampossible. That said, it's nearly impossible to finish under the time limit at later levels, so this is a skip on most speed rotations.
Coin-Flip
Your classic memory game with tokens as the items. I don't actually know the names for most of these so I had to come up with names of my own to say in my head. I call this one Fungus. There's other good ones like Asteroid, Railroad, Cracker and Metro, but Fungus is my favorite.
Fast and easy, everyone has played some variation of this at some point. The rewards don't really scale much, but neither does the difficulty really. Columns get added, thus adding possible tokens but that's about it.
Decent little break between the twitch gameplay of Cryptonoid and Lambo Rider if you're running the whole gauntlet in order.
Lambo Rider
Lambo Rider is basically a much better Token Surfer. You get twice the power points and ten times the cool points for doing basically the exact same thing; collecting coins while avoiding obstacles.
This is another game that really benefits from higher levels. Where Surfer stays at the same speed throughout, here we speed up every level.
While they both increase complexity, the added speed here means the later levels still take the same amount of time instead of getting longer each time.
And you're a hamster in a frickin' Lamborghini, how cool is that?!
General Tips and Tricks
You don't have to wait for the "verifying..." animation or the prize popups that occasionally follow that. As soon as the "YOU WIN!" or "YOU LOSE!" popup appears your game data has been logged, including all rewards.
You can abort any game by refreshing the page which will take you back to the choose game screen. Especially useful for the occasional slow down; if the three count at the beginning of the game is super lagging, then the game will be as well and a refresh will usually clear this.
Each difficulty tier is made up of three levels. If you press the card (and not the start button) it will expand to show you the current level, along with other crucial information like score thresholds.
Managing cooldowns is the name of the game, so picking a rotation suitable to your playstyle and current events (Race or Progression events) is the key to balancing how to make the most out of your time.
Rotations
Short Rotation: If you're just popping in for a second, a complete set of Dr.Hamster, Hamster Climber, Coin-Match, Coin-Flip and Hamspossible can be done in under 2 minutes.
Quest Rotation: They Daily Quest always has a specific game that requires x number of wins. If don't have much time to play that day, ignore the other games completely to get the required game off cooldown as quickly as possible.
Progression Rotation: Occasionally there will be a progression event on where you get 500 points for leveling up in a game. If you want to focus down on this, get everything up to at least difficulty 2, then just rotate through your favorite games and only play the others when they have dropped down a difficulty tier (but are still at Level 3) and one play will result in a tier-up.
Gauntlet Rotation: If you're going to play them all anyway, just churning through them in order makes a lot of sense and takes the cognitive load off the selection process. By the time you finish Lambo, Hex should be off cooldown to rinse and repeat.
Try-Hard Rotation: Once you've pushed gauntlet to the limit, you'll be in a state where the difficulty for Token Blaster or Cryptonoid can be significant especially if you're restarting to maintain your W/L. At this point I just bounce around the other games as they come up, prioritizing short games first, and retrying when nothing else is off cooldown.
So that's about the size of it, like I say I'll do up another article about mining and flipping and using the market to your advantage, but for now I figured this will give anyone who wants to get started a quick leg up! Signing up is stupidly easy, so what are you waiting for?