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Dealing with Rabbits About Reseeding

Every time you place a flag in the Vinesweeper playing field, you will lose it—permanently if you plant in the wrong place or a rabbit gets it; temporarily if you are successful in finding a seed. Since you are only allowed to have a maximum of 10 flags, that means every 10 times you try to mark a seed, you’re going to have to go back to the farmhouse to retrieve flags the farmers saved for you, and buy replacements for any that were lost. There are a couple of issues to consider in how best to do this.

Running out of flags while you play is a real nuisance—obviously you can’t place flags if you don’t have any, but the game won’t even let you dig holes! This means you are pretty much dead in the water. For this reason, I recommend keeping your side view on the inventory screen and keeping an eye on the number of flags you have available, so you can see when you are running low.

To get flags, just head back over the stile closest to you, and right-click either Mrs. Winkin or Farmer Blinkin; then select the “Buy-flags” option as you did when you started playing. The gnome you chose will first check for any flags returned from the farmers, and then offer to sell you more flags, at 500 gp each, to top you up to the maximum of 10 allowed.

You should always get replacement flags so you have the full complement of 10. As an alternative to buying them, you can choose to trade 50 Vinesweeper points to Mrs. Winkin for each replacement flag. Whether using gold or points for flags is best really depends on whether you’d rather use your points for XP or seeds. See the discussion of choosing rewards for more discussion.

You can go back to the farmhouse at any time to get flags, so most players wait until they are completely out before going back for more. The advantage of this is that you spend less time running back and forth; the disadvantage is that once you run out of flags you are pretty much dead in the water, as mentioned above.

Fortunately, there’s a better option, which takes advantage of something I mentioned in the topic on flagging seeds: you do not have to be near the flag when a farmer checks it to get your points. Once I plant my last flag, I only hang around long enough to be sure that one of the farmers will get to the flag before the rabbits. Then I start running back to the farmhouse, and by the time I get there, usually the farmer has cleared the last flag and I can retrieve all of them from Farmer Blinkin. (Some players don’t even wait to ensure their last flag is safe before running back—this saves time, but will cost you the occasional flag. You can try both ways to see which works better for you.)

If you run back before all flags are cleared, be sure to watch your point total before getting more flags; once you see it increase you know the last flag has been cleared. If you are too fast, you’ll end up losing a flag—Farmer Blinkin will give you back 9 of the 10 flags, and then offer to sell you a 10th. You can’t have more than 10, so when the last flag you had planted finally gets cleared, you’ll lose it.

Incidentally, do not try little tricks in an attempt to get extra flags, because they won’t work. J For example, I once traded 500 points to Mrs. Winkin for 10 flags, knowing that there were also 10 flags that had been returned from the farmers. When I then tried to get the original 10 flags back from Farmer Blinkin, I couldn’t, and I also could not get them back later on either—they vanished completely.

Dealing with Rabbits About Reseeding