We just held our class on the EXCELLENT and LEGENDARY Super Mario Bros 3 for the NES on our Video Games 101 channel.
As per usual, Fluff had a number of great tips and facts about the game. One of which was providing a very useful hack for the N-Spade matching game:
As he mentioned in the video, you have the 8 possible boards every time you go into this game (every 80k points).
Flip the left and right-most tiles in the second row and coordinate with this image to determine which board you have, then fill out the rest accordingly:
Note that occasionally you’ll need to flip one last tile to definitively tell which board you have, but once you have that one you should be able to match it with the correct image above and flip that tile’s match accordingly.
From there, flip em’ all and you’ll have added two mushrooms, two fire flowers, two stars, 30 coins, and a 1-up!
Sure, it’s no Tanooki suit or even a Super Leaf, but it’s something!