A few spaces beyond the Scamander's realm is the Skeleton Mummy. If you land in the spot next to him, he will ask for a piece of food. Those who can feed him get to keep their place; those who cannot feed him, however, are forced to move back two spaces. An interesting note: The Skeleton Mummy will only accept the three food items that lie beyond Sutek's Tomb; he will not, however, accept the Ummagine.
Three spots after the Skeleton Mummy is the game's final bag of NPS, which contains 10 NP. Three spaces after that is the game's last pink whirlpool, which has a rather tremendous effect. Not only does landing in this whirlpool take away 60 NPS, but it also drags you back nearly 50 spaces, all the way to the three spots before the Tug-O-War square. This leads to the number one strategy associate with The Great Desert Race's single player mode. In order to rack up the sort of exorbitant socres that are seen on this game's High Scores Table, players must use the final whirlpool and the Tug-O-War square to their maximum ability. The following is an explanation of how this strategy works.
At the start of the game, have one of your two characters take the lead, giving them the majority of the moves earned from your rolls of the die. The other character should stay farther back and try to land exactly on the Tug-O-War space. If you get a roll of the die that is greater than the number of spaces between the second character and the Tug-O-War, then give the move to the first character. When the first character gets within striking distance of the whirlpool, reverse the process, giving the moves that would take them past the whirlpool to the character that is farther back.
While, yes, getting the whirlpool deducts 60 points from your score, this loss is tempered by the fact that, because a point is given out for each square that you move, getting back to the whirlpool gives you back nearly 50 of those points. Therefore, each chance that you get at winning the 100 points from Tug-O-War only costs approximately 10 NP. As a result, as long as you are winning the Tug-O-War more than once every 10 times that you enter the whirlpool, a positive gain in your NP total is being made.
The key to using this method, however, is keeping both characters in play. While it is indeed possible to hold out a little while after one character has passed the whirlpool, it is far quicker and easier to employ this strategy with both characters. This is because, when one character is right next to either the Tug-O-War or the whirlpool, the other character can absorb the rolls of the die that don't give them the exact number that they need.
In the end, though, once your characters have either passed the whirlpool voluntarily or you have decided that you have scored enough points, there are a few final details to note. The first is the pool of quicksand, which is three places after that final whirlpool. If a player lands in there, they will lose a turn. Lastly once the quicksand is passed, 25 NP are awarded when a character rolls the exact number needed and arrives in Sakhmet. An additional 5 NP are given if the player is the first to get there.
As a final note, one should keep the following in mind. While the “Tug-O-War / whirlpool” strategy sounds exceedingly simple, the fact is that, regardless of how lucky you are with rolling the die, getting the kind of score that is necessary to earn a trophy or a place on the High Scores Table will most likely take many, many hours of playing. For example, if you score an average of 1,000 points per hour, it would still take more than five hours to land a spot on the High Scores Table, and an additional for more hours to contend a trophy. So, while there is some level of strategy involved, this is a game that truly awards those with the most patience an perseverance.
