Switch-A-Roo is a puzzle game on prizegames.com. The object/goal of the game is very simple: to move pieces around on the game board using your mouse until you have reprocuced the picture.

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Quick Tips for Switcharoo Success!

1. Don't make any mistakes in your moves! Making a mistake is VERY costly. Instead of scoring +100 or +250 points, you score NEGATIVE 150 points! So try to avoid making any wrong moves!
2. Practice play in free mode until you get good, then go for the big progressive bonus prizebucks in pay-to-play mode. (This is true of ALL prizegames games!)

Game Play

When you first start the game, you are given a choice of categories of pictures to choose from. You must choose from one of three categories, but there are a total of about 10. Here is a list of all the categories:

• Animals
• Cars
• Holidays
• Military
• Monuments
• Places
• Reptiles
• Sea
• Sports

You should choose a category that contains pictures that you like to work with and that you think you can do well in rearranging. My favorite categories are: Animals, Sports, and Cars because I tend to do well with pictures in those categories. I generally don't choose the "Reptiles" category because I just don't particularly like reptiles .

I have also found that there are a few pictures that I consider very difficult to solve, including: a picture of lots of pumpkins in a patch (under the category "Holidays"), and a picture of lots of walruses laying around close together in the sun (under "Sea").

The game begins as soon as you pick the category you want, and you will see picture you will need to solve at level 1. The picture appears for only a couple seconds, then it is jumbled up into pieces (Note: I generally recommend that you do NOT choose the "Sneak a Peek" option since doing so will decrease the number of bonus points you receive at the end of the game.)

Scoring

As mentioned above, the object of the game is to put the picture pieces back in order so it looks like a picture again. You move pieces around by clicking and dragging a piece and placing it where you think it belongs. Instead of clicking/dragging the pieces, you can also simply select two pieces that you want to swap, but I find that dragging the pieces is a bit more of a natural way to play; decide which method you like best!

The piece you move replaces the piece where you move it, and the replaced piece moves back to the original position of the piece you move (so essentially in each move you are just swapping two pieces with each other).

Therefore, there are three possible outcomes of a move:

1. You could swap two pieces and both of these pieces are now positioned correctly (worth a total of 250 points)
2. You could swap two pieces and one of them is now correct while the other one is still in the wrong place (worth a total of 100 points)
3. You could swap two pieces and both of them are still in the wrong place (worth negative 150 points! But your minimum score in any round is 0, so if you're going to make the mistake of swapping two pieces both into incorrect places in the picture, the time to do it is early in the level!).

At the end of a level, your total score is multiplied by the time remaining, so speed counts!

Levels and Maximum Scores

There are a total of 7 levels that you play. Each level is divided into a grid of picture pieces. As you progress through the game, each level gets harder to solve because there are more pieces to the grid than in the previous level. And, the opportunity to score more points also increases with each level.

There is also a maximum possible score you can make in each round if the pieces in that round are placed perfectly so that each move you make results exactly in swapping two pieces to the correct positions. If the pieces are positioned in such a perfect order, then it makes sense that the maximum number of perfect moves you could make is the number of pieces on the level divided by 2.

Of course, that implies an even number of pieces in the level which isn't always the case. On levels where there are an odd number of pieces, the maximum possible points you can score on that level is: (number of pieces minus 1) divided by (2) plus (100 points). The last 100 points are for making exactly the one move that places only one piece correctly, and we of course assume that the rest of the moves are perfect moves that switch two pieces exactly correctly to achieve such a maximum score.

Here is a table showing information about the levels, including the size of the grid (number of pieces across by number of pieces up and down), the number of total pieces, and the maximum possible score that you can achieve on that level.

Two notes about the above table (Table 1):

• Of course, we have not considered the time multiplier for each level, so these are not final level scores.
• The scores indicated are maximum scores. In reality, while you can sometimes achieve maximum scores in levels 1 and 2, it is much more difficult to do so at levels three and above (there is nothing you can do about this; it's randomly decided by the way the game places the pieces).

• All the images by category (in tiny thumbnail format) on a single page.
• CFKman's favorites (and LEAST favorites)!

Above are some of the images I have captured that are used in the game. You can view these images, or download them and then print them, which may help you play the game better.

NOTE: not all the images are included, but I will include more and more as I build up this library of images.

NOTE: I created these images by taking screen shots from my computer while logged into prizegames.com. As far as I know, the full-size images are the property of prizegames.com and are not for re-use.