The Wonderful 1237 Strategy Guides: John Kasich

 By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Take small bites!

We continue our long line of strategy guides for KoopaTV's amazing browser-based Flash game, The Wonderful 1237! The Wonderful 1237 features seventeen unique minigames, all from each of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates you will be competing with. This is our fourth such guide.

As explained in the Wonderful Wednesday article about those minigames, I'll be writing these strategy guides — one for each candidate, in a specific order. This one is about the guy who is the current governor of Ohio: John Kasich. In real life, John Kasich was the last candidate standing against Donald Trump — he absolutely refused to drop out. He's the real-life version of what happens when candidates refuse to drop out of the race. His poll numbers went up just because he was one of the last people around. Why would anyone drop out if you can do that?

Candidate Stats

Base stats and growth:

Beauty: 1 + (1–4)

Cool: 0 + (0–2)

Cute: 2 + (1–4)

Smart: 1 + (0–4)

Tough: 0 + (0–3)

Average untouched stats after 14 rounds:

Beauty: 36

Cool: 14

Cute: 37

Smart: 29

Tough: 21

Average likelihood of surviving Iowa if untouched:

Average likelihood. (John Kasich will have 11 delegates on average; need 11 to clear.)

“VERSUS JOHN KASICH. Fight!”

Minigame

Basic Information

Name:

Table Manners.

Objective:

Choose the most appropriate utensil for the given food.

Approximate Time to Play:

30 seconds.

Controls:

While holding down the spacebar, click one of the four corners.

Strategy

Detailed Description:

After admitting that he doesn't know table manners, John Kasich asks for your help. Five food items will be presented to you one after the other, and you must choose the most appropriate way to consume them: Fork, fork & knife, spoon, or hands?

Scoring:

There are 5 rounds, and you can potentially get 20 points per round. See the spreadsheet immediately below this for the exact scoring. The score you get per round is dependent on the utensil you choose.

Optimal Tactics:

If you follow this spreadsheet and select the 20 every time, you'll get a perfect score.

That's it. Just know what to pick when.

As you can see in the above spreadsheet, if you're just choosing random utensils, Fork is the best. Spoon is the least favoured utensil. You can deduce that there are certain instances when using a knife is inappropriate.

Variants:

As you can count above, there are twelve different foods that can be selected, and there are five selections of food. Once a food is chosen in an earlier round, it may no longer be used in a later round. This means there are 792 possible unique combinations, given that the order the food appears does not matter. These foods, just to get them in text, are:

1. Popcorn
2. Hamburger
3. Pizza
4. Ice cream
5. Chicken soup
6. Canned beans
7. Ramen noodles
8. Caesar salad
9. Meatballs
10. Chicken leg
11. Roasted lamb
12. Cucumber

You eat pizza with your hands, not with a fork!

Other Trivia

Skill(s) Tested:

Real-world cultural knowledge of table manners.

Inspiration/Flavour:

Governor John Kasich was ridiculed on the campaign trail by candidate Donald Trump for the former's eating habits at campaign stops. This was about as much attention as John Kasich received, since the Ohioan wasn't actually winning any states during the primaries. Many news articles were written about Kasich's eating, creating some kind of amusing sideplot. People in the news media speculated that John Kasich's whole strategy was just eating food to connect with voters on a personal level, while others believed that John Kasich didn't drop out yet just so he could travel the country and eat more food, insinuating that Ohio has some kind of food shortage.



As seen in the above compilation, Mr. Trump believed that John Kasich wasn't presidential due to the way he ate his food. Thus, the game is about how to properly eat food.

This is the only game in The Wonderful 1237 that tests you on outside cultural knowledge, not counting arithmetic as outside knowledge. That's considered to be bad game design, and I'm normally inclined to agree. But, hey, it's optional. Of course, I did a lot of research and spent weeks picking out foods and figuring out what's the most culturally-acceptable way to eat them. This is all foreign to me, of course, as someone who doesn't have table manners and isn't a part of American (or even human) culture.

Play The Minigame Here!

If you disagree with the research on how to properly eat certain foods, it doesn't matter because Ludwig won't patch the game with your opinion. You can try crying in the comments section, however, and see where that gets you.


The previous strategy guide is for Marco Rubio.
The next one is for the token black guy. ...And he's really fearsome.
In a strange twist, the utensils research conducted in this article is later used to determine which Splatfest team you should pick.