Hi, everyone! Welcome to K-man's pogo.com Overflow page. Here I'll present some info about the game including some hints and tips and a bunch of screen shots.

I'm not entirely sure whether or not I'd consider myself a very good Overflow player. My best game to date was 670,243 points, but since there is no chat associated with Overflow, I'm not sure if that's good or just average (But I do think I'm at least average!). For all I know, there may be folks out there scoring in the 10's of millions on their worst days! Send me an email and let me know your best overflow score!

Also, don't you think it would be cool if we were able to earn tokens for playing overflow? Doesn't have to be anything real big--maybe 10 tokens for each level complete and maybe one token per 10,000 points that we rack up--but it would be pretty cool nonetheless!

I'm gonna start here with a table listing my several best scores to date (keeping track of this helps me have something to shoot for!).

What is overflow?

Overflow is a game on pogo.com where you try to place pieces of a long "straw" together to complete a puzzle and earn points. I was originally attracted to this game because it was similar to a game called "xpipe" that I used to play under X-windows (unix). "xpipe" used pipes instead of straws, and didn't allow you to blow up obstacles.

There are basically two goals in overflow: (1) to complete the current level's "puzzle" and thus progress to the next level; (2) to accumulate the maximum number of points possible.

Tips and Hints

Now for some tips and hints:

• You'll get the most points if you use the plus-shaped pieces and you get the flow to cross through both the vertical and horizontal parts of the straw of the same piece.
• The more plus pieces you use (and cross both up and down and left-to-right), the higher your bonus score: the first plus you complete will score you 250 points. the second 500 points, the third 750 points, and so on, increasing by 250 points for each new plus that you cross completely.
• If you complete a puzzle and you press the "running man" icon on the left of the screen, not only will the flow speed to the end of a level, but bonus point values for each piece or prize will increase by 10%. Here's a table showing the bonus values of various parts of a puzzle:

  Puzzle parts and their values

  Description	Value (slow speed)	Value (fast speed)
  Crossing a "plus" piece	250 for first, increasing by 250 for each additional	current value +10%, increasing by 275 for each additional
  Going through an ice cube with an embedded piece of straw	150	165
  Going through one of the four corners of the puzzle	500	550

  
  
• There are two other ways you can get bonus points. The first way is that occasionally a green "pogo" logo will appear in an empty space for a few seconds. If you place a piece over it while it is visible, you'll get 150 bonus points. Also, at the end of each successful level, you'll be awarded some bonus points (I think the value here is based on how many spaces you have left unused--that is, spaces through which the flow did NOT go).
• It's very helpful to have a design in mind before you begin. In order to help you with this, here's a graphic of the puzzle, completely blank. The puzzle is 11 spaces wide by 7 spaces high. If you save this graphic to a file, then open it with the Microsoft "Paint" program (comes with Win95 and Win98), you should be able to print it, then you can draw on the graphic to help you figure out how to win the most points! (Note--the graphic is sized so that you can print four on a page, two on each side of a piece of paper; you can just put the piece of paper back into the printer to get the most prints per page).
  

  (Save the following image to a file, print, and use to draw your own overflow plans!
  You can also just print this page)

  

OK; that's about it. If you're interested, you can check out my screenshots page, which has a bunch of pictures of overflow at various levels.