Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve played a lot of Party House, game #25 in UFO 50. I’m not the best player at it, I’ve heard there’s some with a random scenario win streak of over 130, but I have gotten up to 25. I wrote a strategy guide for it that’s one of the most searched-for pages here. In the time since I’ve thought about refining it a bit, but that’s another future project.
That’s for the future; what about the now? Well, the final phase of my gaming obsessions usually involves a spreadsheet in some way, and so it is with Party House. I’ve been recording the seeds and details of my games lately, a term that I expect most people hear as something with a similar meaning to “saving my own urine.”
Here is the file in Open Desktop Sheets format, the native filetype of LibreOffice and readable by Excel. (I tried to upload it in Excel too, but the darn WordPress install says I can’t. SIGH.)
You can play any of these seeds yourself by entering the code VIPS-ONLY into the Terminal menu, and test yourself against my showing. I won 57 games of the 65, for a victory rate of slightly better than 7-in-8.
Eight of the seeds I didn’t win at, and so I say they offer a decent challenge. They are: 879007, 76918, 988273, 198638, 469055, 2974, 996289 and 107289.
What if you’d rather have an easy game instead? Two games I finished with 8 days left: 429459 and 154523. Two I finished in 7: 298866, 981042. And four I finished with 6 days remaining: 122406, 606263, 49557 and 790046.
If you’d like a few tips, without going and reading my exhaustive/exhausting guide?
- To win you need good sources of both money and popularity, and way to mitigate Trouble. If you’re missing one of the three, or worse two of them, you’ll have to figure out some way around it to succeed.
- Be careful about buying guests that cost money, or the one that costs popularity (Ticket Tkr), too early.
- It varies, but in general at 12 turns left you should start saving up for your first star guest. At 8 you should be well on your way.
- The easiest scenarios are those with a good source of income. Bartender, Auctioneer and Spy herald pretty easy games.
- Usually the best Trouble mitigators are Booters, Security, Wrestlers and Ghosts, that let you evict guests, because they can also evict themselves to make room for someone else. But an exception….
- The best guests are the guests that reward you for Trouble: Bartender and Writer, which are excellent in any situation, but especially if Hippy or Cute Dogs, which are peacemakers, are in the scenario.
- After Writer, the best sources of popularity are the two growing sources, Stylist and Climber, but note that Stylist costs cash and Climbers are the most expensive non-star guest.
- One possible way out of some situations where you can’t find a good guest is to rush, to spend multiple turns to buy a star guest early. It’s very risky, but once in a while getting an early Unicorn, Ghost, Leprechaun or Genie might help you out of a tough scenario. Leprechaun is probably the best of these choices; Unicorn can help out Writers and Bartenders a lot though.
