Yikes! What happened to Find 'Em? Around the beginning of January, 2001, Find 'Em suddenly disappeared from the progressive lists (both free play and pay-to-play modes). Additionally, when I go to play Find 'Em now, if I have any credits in my account, I can *only* play in pay-to-play mode and not in free-play mode for 1 credit. I don't know why this is! If anyone knows what's going on with Find 'Em, let me know!

Find 'Em is a word search game, similar to those you might find in the newspaper or a book of word games. There is one difference between the a normal word search game and Find 'Em, however: in Find 'Em, not only can words run in any direction (right, left, down, up and any diagonal direction), but words can also change directions in the middle of the word!

The game consists of a 10 x 10 grid of letters; some of the letters are capitalized and some are not, and capitalization counts! Most words you need to find begin with a capital letter, so train your brain to look for capitals to find the beginning of each word.

When you start playing the game, you are presented with a choice of 3 word topics (there are a total of about 10 topics, but you get a choice from 3 random topics). Here's a list of all the possible topics:

• Animals
• Baseball
• Football
• Halloween
• Movies
• Names
• Pokemon
• Space
• Television

Choosing a Topic (Category)

When you choose a topic, you should consider two things:

1. If your primary goal is to get a high score in the game, choose a topic that generally contains very long words, since your score depends very much on word length. Topics that tend to have longer words are: Movies, Television, and Space. Topics that tend to have shorter words are: Names and Animals. Most of the other topics tend to have more medium-length words.
2. Choose a topic that contains words that you are more familiar with and you will likely do better! For example, I am not very familiar with Pokemon characters, so therefore I tend to not score very well in that category (so I don't usually choose it!).

As you play a particular topic more and more, you will begin to recognize many of the words in that topic. This is useful as you can then use this knowledge to highlight a word without necessarily having first checked to see if it is actually in the list! So choosing the same topic often will tend to allow you to get better scores.

Game Play and Object of the game

Game play is very simple and is exactly what you would expect: After you choose a topic, the game will start and you will see your word grid for level 1 (there are a total of 5 levels in the game, so you will see five different 10 x 10 grids of letters throughout the course of one game).

The object of the game is to simply find the words presented on the right part of the screen in the word grid. To indicate that you have found a word, click on the first letter of the word to highlight, then continue clicking on more letters in the word until you have highlighted the entire word. To highlight a word, you can either click on letters separately or you can also just click and drag your mouse over part or all of a word then release the mouse button. It is not necessary to click on every letter in a word.

The higher the level, the more likely it is that a word will change directions multiple times in the middle of the word.

How scoring works

There are 5 levels in the game, and as might be expected, the later levels not only have more words to find, but you can score many more points at the higher levels. Usually the number of words you have to find for each level is the level number plus 2 (for example, usually on level 4 you have to find 6 words).

You must find all the words on a level before the time for that level runs out in order to advance to the next level. For each word you complete, you will get a score for that word (the score appears on the playing grid area briefly in green numbers and is sometimes hard to even notice; you don't have to worry about this score for individual words as the game keeps track of your score for you).

Individual words are scored according to the formula:

• (Current time remaining) times (length of word) times (100) divided by (current level divisor)

Level divisors are as indicated in the following table:

As you can see by the above table, as the level number increases, the level divisor decreases, meaning that your score for individual words will increase as the level increases. In fact (for example), your score for individual words will be about 10 times as much in level 5 as in level 1, depending on the current time left on the clock.

Speed is doubly important in this game because at the end of each level (round), in addition to the points you have scored for each word in that level, you also get a bonus score depending on the time left on the clock and also on what level you are on. The bonus score is equal to the time left on the clock times a bonus *multiplier* for that level.

End-of-round level multipliers are as indicated in the following table:

Tips

Between each level, watch the screen right under the scoring area for a tip that will help you play better! Other tips include:

• Play as fast as you can; time is doubly important as it counts both for individual word scores and toward your bonus score at the end of each level.
• Find longer words first, which will tend to increase your score. (But if I see a shorter word before a longer word, I tend to hightlight it as soon as I find it anyway.)
• You can re-use letters in multiple words but not in the same word.
• Get ready for each round by watching the area where the words appear so you can get a head start on the round
• If you are playing in pay-to-play mode and you win an instaprize, instaprize notice is displayed near the middle of the screen for about 5 seconds or so. But part of the game display is still visible. Use these 5 seconds wisely by looking in the visible area for words you haven't found yet!

With practice, eventually you should get to the point where you can pretty easily earn 250,000 points (5 prizebucks in free play mode) per game every time you play. However, getting a score over 350,000 points (6 prizebucks in free play mode) is very difficult indeed!

And, as always the most important tip is to have fun!