Dice-A-Roo is one of the few chance games that's actually rigged in your favor. As such, there comes a time in your play that your pet will say they are bored and you will no longer be able to play it that day. The main problem that people have had with the game is the amount of time that is involved in playing it. Clicking Roll Again each time takes about 20 minutes until your pet gets bored. To circumvent this, a click-and-hold method was developed. If you already know it, skip these two paragraphs. With Windows XP, click Start and choose Control Panel. Click on Printers and Other Hardware and then click on Keyboard. For pre-XP Windows systems, click Start, mouse over Setting and select Control Panel, then double-click on Keyboard. On the Speed tab, decrease the Repeat Rate to between 1/6 and 1/8 of maximum, as shown in the image below. Tested it with Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Internet Explorer and the only one of them in which I can get it to work is IE.
When you play DAR, you begin on the screen with the King Blumaroo. Click on the button labelled Let's Play! (Costs 5 NP). If this brings you into the game where you've got a single die on screen, keep clicking Roll Again until you get back to the King and click the button again. You are trying to get to the screen with the five dice as shown below. Once on this screen, press and hold the Enter button and then click the button labelled Play Dice-A-Roo. The "common wisdom" is to simply put something heavy on the Enter key and walk away In roughly 3-4 minutes, your pet will be bored and you can move on to something else, like reselling all the food you've won.
There are two primary reasons to play Dice-A-Roo, and neither of them is the jackpot. Every time you change pages at NP, you create a site hit. Each site hit causes the ad banners to go off, which is what pays for the site and allows us to continue to visit the site for free. As a "thank you," NP has keyed random events to site hits. Every page you access has a chance of a random event occuring. The more pages you access, the more hits, the more likely you are to get a random. Although a few of these are bad (Pant Devil attack, Evil Grundo Leader, etc.) the majority of them are good events ranging from you finding some rare item on the ground, to the Faeries giving you a quest which, upon completion, will increase one of your pets' stats. Because it is a .php game instead of flash, simply playing Dice-A-Roo generates a site hit for every roll of the die ... and you have to roll it a lot until your pet gets bored. The other reason for playing are the awards. At green, yellow, and silver, you have the chance of rolling a present (see below) which grants you a food item. Typically you will gain anywhere from 4-12 food items, and these can then be put into your shop and resold. The gross of those sales will (almost always) more than cover the ~400NPs it costs you to play. On three occasions I have gotten items that did not resell for enough to recoup my losses (-34NPs, -60NPs, and -110NPs),
Now, this click-and-hold is all well and good, but, quite frankly, is a rather silly way to play the game. Lots of people ask about the "mystic wind," so here you are. The green die will only yield the mystic wind result. Anytime you get the mystic wind, nothing happens, period. When you get to the yellow die, there is a chance, roughly 1/3, that you will instead receive a lottery ticket. When you get to the silver die, there is an additional result, also roughly 1/3, that you will get a Pant Devil attack.
remember what the Pant Devil does? That's right. He steals items from your inventory. Although the Pant Devil attack is merely a 1 in 3 chance, I've had as many as 4 in a row when the silver ? has come up. If I were playing the click-and-hold, that's four items gone. Maybe the Bitten Red Apple doesn't matter much, but what if one of the random events was that I found a codestone or a piece of the Secret Laboratory Map? If I were doing click-and-hold, I wouldn't even know that I ever had them before the Pant Devil stole it. No, I'm not recommending that you play the game fully, but there is a way to protect your items. In the IE window, set up to play as above for the click-and-hold. In another browser (IE or whatever) open up your inventory and move everything that's there into your Safety Deposit Box or your shop. Back in the Dice-A-Roo game window, on the bottom right you will see a picture of a globe next to the word Internet. To the left of it are five boxes. As you can see, when you load a page, another box will be created to the left of them, and is called the load bar. This will fill in from the left to right with blue.
Run the click-and-hold until the load bar has started over about 10 times, then let go of the Enter key. If you are on a red die, back up, click anywhere on the whitespace of the screen (this deactivates the Play button), press and hold the Enter key, and click on the button. Repeat until you get to the blue die or higher. Once you are on the blue die, repeat this same process, but only let the load bar complete 5 times until you get to green or higher. Once you are on green or yellow, play the game normally (click the Roll Again button) until you get Game Over or the yellow advance die with the comment beginning "Well done!" If you let go of the Enter key and discover you are on silver already, clean out your inventory immediately. Chances are that you got to silver so quickly that you got no items along the way, but there's no sense in risking it (see below).
Once you receive any of these three results, go over to the window with your inventory and refresh. Move everything in it out to your SDB or your shop ... worry about pricing the items in your shop later. If you got Game Over, repeat this process. On the other hand, if you have advanced to silver, you are now in the danger zone. Every time you roll the silver ? there's a chance of a Pant Devil attack. This whole process is to make sure that there's nothing for him TO steal, so keep a close watch on your results. If you are given an item, go over to the other window and get whatever it is out to your SDB or shop before you roll the die again.
Instead of the 3-4 minutes it takes for your pet to become bored on a full click-and-hold, this will take you 10 minutes. To my mind, the extra 6-7 minutes you have to spend to ensure that you get to keep everything you've won is well worth it.
If someone played DAR (probably on a full click-and-hold) and ended up with one of these types of things in their inventory it came as a result of playing, but did not actually come from the game. Remember #1 up there? More hits = more randoms. While playing, they had at least one random event. One of these is what gave them the item, but the game itself did not present the item to them. It's a small, but rather important, distinction.
