BLURBUBBLE RUINED MY LIFE!!! (playandwin.co.uk)

Member Name: Emma1973

Product:	playandwin.co.uk
Date:	06/06/04 (150 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good range of games, Easy site

Disadvantages: Addictive, Damned arguing

How long has it been since I posted regularly? A month or so? Bah! You lot probably haven't even noticed, have you? I could have had a nasty malady or fallen out of a tree and broken both my arms! And not a peep from you lot!
Actually the only thing I can come up with is that I have been brainwashed. I got introduced to this site (It's all Blurbubbles fault) and I swear it must issue subliminal messages at me because I just cant stay away. 'Play me, play me' it whispers inside my head. I just cant keep away from it, in fact I cant even remember what I used to do on the computer before I was recommended to this site!!

Playandwin they call it, says it all really. You play games, win stuff, there you are, all done, can I go now? There's a game of Solitaire calling my name. Come on, I deserve an SH at least. Unfortunately Alan has banned me from the site for a while so I may as well carry on!

Anyway, this me tell you about this foreboding place. Its one of the multitude of sites on the Web that brings lists of games together for you to play with the chance of winning money, pogo.com and Yahoo come to mind.
Contrary to something like Yahoo this site tempts you in with the chance of financial rewards. Not that they give it away of course, any site that offered us pennies for playing games would be deludged by hordes of us money seekers. Of course you earn tokens with these games but more about that later.



The Site


What a pleasant thing to behold, a webpage that is easy on the eye and straightforward. First of all you have to register, pick a user name, the usual malarky and you're all set to take a further look.

There's plenty of info on the site, rules, regulations. Profiles, chat guide, how the token system works and loads more that I don't think I've ever looked at. You can also see how many tokens you have, and there's a list of the current administrators o
n line.

Then slap bang in the centre of the page are the games, divided into two sections, single player and multi-player ones. A game looking lot too, game, geddit, a pun?) Lost on you lot!



The Games

The multi-player games are rather fun, Bingo's always a popular, 6 rooms ranging from Speed Bingo to Newbie Bingo, usually full. As usual you fill in the numbers, when you win you get a quick spin on the ferris wheel and it tells you how many token you have won. To my chagrin I've never ever won!

Yahtzee is the electronic version, one on one, and its very hard and confusing and its all times, and I've lost every single time!
See a thread here?
Other games are Hearts and Backgammon, but considering my track record I steer clear, preferring to lose against myself which I do frequently!

So I'm usually scuttling round the left hand of the screen with the single player games, I'm usually debating between a card game or a puzzle or arcade game. I'll give you a list of the games, but just tell you about a few of my favourites because it would be boring and tedious to just list them all with just a short description. They are:

Egyptian Pyramids
Super 7 Solitaire
Arabian Solitaire
Freecell
Spider
Rocket

Ice Cubes
Space Bricks
Mah Jong
Mini Jong
Balloon Buster
Super Diamond Mine
Word Game
Money Spin
Diamond Mine.

Now me, I'm a card game type of girl so that's my fav. Most people have played Freecell and Spider, Rock is basically Pontoon, and there's two types of solitaire games, 1 card and 3 card draw. My absolute fav is Egyptian Pyramids, its so hard to explain though, basically a pyramid of card that you have to stack and get rid of to clear the screen and go on to the next round. More difficult than I looks and extremely, extremely addictive!

The reason the games really appeal is the way they
are set up, all nice bright separate windows, complete with noises and great graphics, each game is themed, for instance Spider with its spooky back ground, maniacal laughs and flying bats. Of course the fact they you can see your tokens totting up is always nice, and when they inch towards that bonus spin...... Aah, the bonus spin, yep you get a chance at this, in most of the games it for clearing the screen, in others its for doing it in a certain length of time, in others its there for the hell of it! You get anything up to an extra 1000 tokens, and a chance at the bank which can rack up quite high, which of course I've never won!!

All right I keep mentioning these damn things


The Tokens

As you're playing the games you rack up tokens, unfortunately for me this is not true of Bingo and Money Spin, but I'm quite good on the others. So you've got all these tokens, they're twinkling prettily away at the top of the page but what do you do with them? Well, you use them to purchase tickets, raffle tickets to be precise Each ticket is going to cost you a 1000 tokens and you can buy as many or as few as you like. Then every Thursday all the tokens are entered into a draw to win 1 prize of £100 and 5 prizes of £20 which are then shipped out to you in the forms of cheques. At this point any tokens you didn't use to buy tickets are wiped up and you're back to zero.
You can also get tokens through referrals, sending playandwin postcards, clicking on banners and having a go at the scratchcard which might also net you a tenner.


Many don't come on here just to play though, they also come here to chat, which as you might have noticed I've mentioned once or twice. Now the chat isn't a separate thing. The chat comes up when you open up a game, at the point you are in the room of the game you are playing although you can change from room to room but don't have to change the game. Of course
it isn't a free for all chat, there are rules, no swearing, no racist abuse, no sexual language, etc, all of which are looked over and after by the admins. Who you get to be an admin seems to be a mystery in itself, recommended by other ones apparently, which did lead to a rather big coup and clear out and very popular admins a few weeks ago.
One thing the management did do, which in my humble opinion was a very bad thing, was decree that admins had to abide by the rules, which includes, getting 3 warnings before they mute you in the event of naughty behaviour, and then a ban for a set period of time after 3 mutes, but decided that they had the absolute power over the rooms, their actions or behaviour could not be questioned, their decisions were final. Which unfortunately has been completely abused, resulting in people leaving and quite frankly, my biggest dislike about this site. Being honest I did get banned for 4 days a few weeks ago, why?. I asked an admin if it was an abuse of her power to ban power when she liked without warnings and mutes, to which she replied yes and banned me from the chat!

Obviously some are good but there is a large majority of them who are real jobsworths and abusive in every way possible, even down to deciding if a certain tv show could be talked about (Corrie, as he happens). If I leave it will be because of this awful nannying behaviour

I don't want to go though because I genuinely enjoy the site, the range of games are good and highly playable, the level of 'bugginess' is very low, usually resulting in the chat being a bit slow. Its highly addictive, in between typing this I've been clicking away on Super 7 Solitaire. Am I ever going to win anything? Very, very unlikely because of the sheer amount of people that play on the site, but you never know. I live in hope. I don't go on the site anyway to win, its purely for fun now, but it is so very addictive. In fact its so addictive it sh
ould have a health warning!!

Summary: