Wrath of the Gopher! is an awesome game that prizegames introduced in April of 2001. I must admit that it didn't take me too long to get addicted to this game, and now it's the game I tend to play most often!
The object of the game is fairly simple. You are the gopher, and your goal is to eat all of the cabbages in the garden that you see on the screen before the farmer wakes from his slumber and konks you on the head!
All of prizegames.com's games require some skill, balanced with some luck. However, I think that in Wrath of the Gopher, luck is much less of a factor than is skill. That is, if you practice playing Wrath enough, you'll eventually reach a point where you can score very high almost every time you play.
There are 20 levels in Wrath. It is *so* cool the first time you complete level 20 (watch to see what happens to the farmer!). As you play the game, if you complete your current level without making a mistake you get bonus points. As the levels progress and get harder, the bonus points you can win for a perfect level also go up, especially in the higher levels. Here's a table showing how many bonus points you earn for a perfect game at each level:
| Table 1: Wrath Bonus Points | ||
|---|---|---|
| Level | Bonus points playing level perfectly |
Total cumulative bonus points possible so far for playing all levels perfectly |
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 200 | 200 |
| 3 | 300 | 500 |
| 4 | 400 | 900 |
| 5 | 500 | 1,400 |
| 6 | 600 | 2,000 |
| 7 | 700 | 2,700 |
| 8 | 800 | 3,500 |
| 9 | 900 | 4,400 |
| 10 | 1,000 | 5,400 |
| 11 | 2,000 | 7,400 |
| 12 | 3,000 | 10,400 |
| 13 | 4,000 | 14,400 |
| 14 | 5,000 | 19,400 |
| 15 | 6,000 | 25,400 |
| 16 | 7,000 | 32,400 |
| 17 | 8,000 | 40,400 |
| 18 | 9,000 | 49,400 |
| 19 | 10,000 | 59,400 |
| 20 | 20,000 | 79,400 |
You can see from the table above that you can earn almost 80,000 points just in bonuses for playing without making a mistake. And check out level 20: it's worth 20,000 bonus points for getting through it perfectly! So it's definitely worthwhile to spend a few seconds at the beginning of the higher levels checking out how the cabbages are arranged and trying to plot a course first.
More on scoring: eat cabbages in a long straight line when possible! of course you also earn regular (non-bonus) points for each level. The one secret that you can't learn unless you have either completed the game or unless you have paid CLOSE attention is that the more cabbages that you eat one after another IN A STRAIGHT LINE WITHOUT TURNING, the higher each cabbage is worth. In fact, when you eat a cabbage, it's worth 7 "points". But if you continue on in a straight line, the SECOND cabbage is worth double that: 14 points. And the third cabbage you eat without turning in a new direction is worth 21 points, and so on.
So as much as possible, try to eat cabbages in a straight line before turning. Here's an example of how much of a difference this makes. Let's supposed that you're almost finished with a level and you find that you have a single "grid" of 3 rows of 7 cabbages each. If you eat the cabbages by column (3 at a time), you'll earn 7 + 14 + 21 = 42 points for each column, times 7 columns, equals 294 points. But if you eat through this grid by ROW instead of by COLUMN, you'll earn 7 + 14 + 21 + 28 + 35 + 42 + 49 = 196 points for each row, times 3 rows, equals 588 points! Almost twice as many points for eating down the length of the row instead of by width. If you get a row of cabbages that takes up the whole length of the screen (in level 15 or higher), that single row alone will be worth 840 points(!). (Note that the example above isn't *quite* accurate point-wise, but it's close enough so that you can see that it's beneficial to try to eat lots of cabbages in a rows without changing direction.)
More on scoring: end of a level At the end of your level, all the points that you have gotten by eating cabbages are multiplied by the number of ticks left on your clock, so the faster you play a level, the more points you'll get!
How do you know if you're playing a game that might make the daily progressive list?. These days, you need to score at least around 140,000 to get your score in the progressive list. Here's a table of points and levels demonstrating how many points you should have at the end of that level to know you're doing really well...
| Table 2: Some Level Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| You know you're doing REALLY well at your current game if you have reached this score... |
...by the END of this level |
| 11,000 | 5 |
| 14,000 | 6 |
| 23,000 | 8 |
| 35,000 | 10 |
| 45,000 | 12 |
| 90,000 | 16 |
| 120,000 | 19 |
| Make sure to play a perfect level to get your 20,000 bonus points! |
20 |
There is some other information you may wish to know about each various level in Wrath:
Table 3 shows how much time you have to complete each level (assuming that you don't pick up a red clock which gives you more time), how big the level's garden is, and a sample image of each level:
| Table 3: Miscellaneous Level Information | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Level | Amount of time until farmer George appears on the screen |
Level Grid Size | Sample Image (click to enlarge) |
| 1 | 60 seconds | 1 x 7 |
 |
| 2 | 60 seconds | 4 x 4 |
 |
| 3 | 50 seconds | 5 x 5 |
 |
| 4 | 45 seconds | 6 x 6 |
 |
| 5 | 30 seconds | 7 x 7 |
 |
| 6 | 35 seconds | 8 x 8 |
 |
| 7 | 45 seconds | 9 x 9 |
 |
| 8 | 35 seconds | 10 x 10 |
 |
| 9 | 40 seconds | 10 x 10 |
 |
| 10 | 50 seconds | 11 x 11 |
 |
| 11 | 30 seconds | 4 x 13 |
 |
| 12 | 40 seconds | 11 x 12 |
 |
| 13 | 1 minute, 10 seconds | 11 x 13 |
 |
| 14 | 35 seconds | 11 x 4 |
 |
| 15 | 1 minute, 20 seconds | 13 x 15 |
 |
| 16 | 1 minute, 20 seconds | 13 x 15 |
 |
| 17 | 20 seconds | 2 x 13 |
 |
| 18 | 1 minute 30 seconds | 13 x 15 |
 |
| 19 | 20 seconds | 4 x 4 |
 |
| 20 | 1 minute, 20 seconds | 13 x 15 |
 |
You can see that on levels 17 and 19 you only have 20 seconds to complete the level. The level with the longest time is level 18 which gives you a minute and a half to complete the level.