Let's recap from the play overview page (click here to review that page). You move upwards in game levels of difficulty by successfully guiding your frogs to eat bugs, and you can only move up to the next level if at the end of the current level you have sufficient tadpoles to allow you to progress up in level. You start with a big dollop of tadpoles which is partly derived from your time bonus and over time become more and more dependent upon your ability to correctly eat bugs - particularly if the time bonus is gone completely. When the time bonus is gone completely, the only thing keeping your tadpoles alive is your ability to correctly eat bugs.
The more bugs correct you get in sequence, the wider all of your frogs have their tongues grow. This means that you get more points from every correct bug you eat. So how do you get even MORE score points and get a better shot at the high score? The answer to high scores is here. Tongue Bonus bugs!
Tongue Bonus Bugs are great things, but it is important to understand how they work to get the most out of them. You can devise your own strategies and see which give you the most points overall at the end of a game. Here is how they operate, and here are some suggested strategies to try out.
When do they appear? Tongue Bonus Bugs appear randomly at any time just like any other kind of bonus bug - and they don't stick around for long so you have to act fast to grab them.
What do they do for me? Whenever a frog eats a bonus bug, and any frog can eat any bonus bug, that frog's tongue bonus gets increased by the Tongue Bonus Bug's bonus amount. If the same frog eats a lot of Tongue Bonus Bugs, then it can get a huge tongue bonus and a huge tongue. This is IN ADDITION TO any increase in tongue width that you may have accumulate for all your frogs by eating many different bugs correctly in sequence. The bigger your frog tongue, the more score points you get for every correct bug much your frog accomplishes. Therefore, the more Tongue Bonus you can accumulate the better for your score. Each frog has its own separate tongue bonus, so you have to decide when you see a tongue bonus bug if you just want to eat it as quickly as you can with your current hungry frog, or if you want to have a particular frog eat it to increase that frog's tongue bonus specially.
When do I lose my tongue bonus? Once you have a good fat tongue, you don't want to lose it. You lose the ENTIRE Tongue Bonus for any frog if that frog makes a wrong attempt to eat a bug. If that happens, not only does that frog lose his entire Tongue Bonus, but EVERY OTHER FROG also loses part of their Tongue Bonus. In other words, once you have a nice big fat tongued frog or two, you want to be extra careful about what you eat, or you will lose the bonus. You also have all your frog tongues start again at the narrowest width at the start of each new level. This makes the Tongue Bonus bugs really really important at very high levels where you can get a huge score if you can get some early Tongue Bonus bugs eaten and then keep them for the entire level - later levels take a lot longer to finish, so you have a lot of bugs to eat.
What are some strategies? You may want to try experimenting with trying to load all your bonus up on one or two frogs, but this means that if you make one mistake with one of those frogs you can lose a lot. Try it out. You can also try to do the opposite and spread out your Tongue Bonus Bug eating across as many frogs as possible. This makes it safer if you mistakenly try to eat the wrong but with one of the frogs with a tongue bonus. You can also try to keep all your tongue bonus on one or two frogs whose bugs you know pretty well and hope a lot of those bugs show up. Try experimenting.
Some big tongue bonus in action:
As you play through a level you want to keep the most tadpoles alive because the number of tadpoles you have at the end of level determines if you can advance to the next level of difficulty. If you can finish a level early when you have Time Bonus left, that helps give you a better chance to advance. If you can finish a level with lots of tadpoles because you have been eating lots of different bugs correctly in sequence without making a mistake, that helps give you a better chance as well. You will find that at some levels you finish very fast with lots of time bonus, and at other levels it may take longer and you have no time bonus but you have a huge accuracy bonus if you have been careful to only eat the correct bugs.
The final arbiter to whether you advance to a new level, stay at the same level, or even drop back a level is the 'Score Tally' or 'Tadpole Bonus Tally' screen.
NOTE: You can skip the tally screens at any time when they are running by hitting any key on the keyboard.
The sample movie above shows a typical tally sequence for a level which went well. There are lots of tadpoles and a time bonus and accuracy bonus. Watch the tally sequence to understand it.
First Tally Screen
In the first tally screen, you see a stream of tadpoles swim across and down into a tube next to a frog just showing his head at the bottom of the screen. These tadpoles represent the tadpoles you had at the end of the game level you just completed (with some slight variations based upon how well you did in the level). Each green tadpole makes the frog move up just a little bit. Each yellow tadpole makes the frog burp and move up a lot. If the frog can reach the top of the golden tube, then you will move to the next level of difficulty. The gold bar at the far right also represents the frog's progress. If your tadpoles are not enough to get your frog to the top, then you will not advance yet to the next level of difficulty. This is why it is important to keep lots of tadpoles alive in the game!
Second Tally Screen
In the second tally screen your time bonus and accuracy bonus counts are added up together and then added to your score at the end of the level to give you a new total score. You then progress to a new level. It your frog did not have enough tadpoles in the first tally screen, you will not move to a new difficulty level, but you will have a brand new set of frogs and new bugs to try again to win at the same level you just played.
NOTE: You can skip the tally screens at any time when they are running by hitting any key on the keyboard.
The two player game is described in detail on the Fun Menu page, but everything about bonus bugs and especially Tongue Bonus Bugs still applies in the two player game. You still want to make sure that once you have a good tongue on a frog, you are extra careful with that frog to only eat correct bugs. You both move from one level to the next in the same way as for the single player game, so it is to both your advantages to have lots of tadpoles at the end of a level, even if you are playing to see who can get the better individual score.
If you ever run out of tadpoles, the game ends. When your tadpoles are getting low in number, a warning count blinks just below the player name under the game screen bug box. You will also hear a bleep every time you lose another tadpole to remind you that you need to start eating some bugs correctly or you may run out of tadpoles altogether and end the game. There are two ways to get back more tadpoles if you are this close to the end. You can hope that a huge Time Bonus Bug appears to resurrect your time bonus and give more tadpoles that way (a long shot indeed), or you can be extra careful to only eat correct bugs. Try to eat as many different correct bugs as you can in succession, and you can often bring your tadpole count back up from just 1 tadpole to hundreds of them. Remember the more different bugs in a row you can correctly eat, the more you will regain tadpoles and get out of danger.
Finally, if the game ends because you run out of tadpoles the high scores will be displayed and you will receive a new high score if your score is high enough. Each player's three highest personal scores are recorded in the high scores list. The following HUGE screen capture shows an end of game high score where the player was playing a game with both Hungry Frog Latin and Hungry Frog German mixed together:
