🎰 Slots

🎰 The idea

Press the button. The reels stop. If the pictures match from the left-hand reel across — two, three, four or five in a row — that line pays.
That is the whole game. There is no decision in it anywhere, and that is the first honest thing this machine has to tell you.

🚫 What a real machine does that this one does not

The near miss. Real reels are weighted: the jackpot picture is put on the squares just above and below the line far more often than on the line itself, so you "almost" win over and over. Here every reel has one of each picture and stops in a completely random place — a near miss is not something this machine can even do.

The loss dressed up as a win. Bet 5 across five lines, one line pays 2, and a real machine plays a fanfare. You just lost 3. Here, a spin that gives back less than it cost is a loss — in the words, in the colour and in the sound.

The thing it will not tell you. A real machine's return is printed in a manual nobody reads. This one puts it on the front, works it out by counting every single thing that can happen, and draws your own number beside it while you play.

📈 The chart is the game

The green line is what this machine pays back over a very long time. The gold line is what you have got back so far.
For the first few spins the gold line is all over the place — miles above the green one, then miles below. Keep going and it stops jumping about and settles onto the green line. That is not the machine changing its mind. It is what randomness looks like when you finally have enough of it.

💎 Why the big machine takes longer to be honest

All three machines pay back about the same. But the big one's best prize is eight hundred times your bet, and it lands about once in every eight thousand tries — so more than a tenth of everything that machine gives back goes to almost nobody.
That means somebody who plays the big machine for a few hundred spins is almost always well below its advertised number, and the chart will show them sitting there. Nothing is wrong. That is what a big jackpot costs everybody who does not win it, and it is the reason a real machine advertises the prize and not the percentage.

🔢 The three machines

Worked out by counting every combination: 64 of them on the small machine, 625 on the middle one and 7,776 on the big one. A bigger machine here is bigger, not meaner.

🙂 Levels

🌱 Sprout: three reels, four pictures, one line.
🧭 Scout: four reels, five pictures, three lines.
🏆 Ace: five reels, six pictures, five lines, and every combination shown beside how often it lands.
A level changes how much machine there is. It never hides anything — the whole paytable is on the screen at every one of them.

🪙 The counters

They are counters. They buy nothing, they turn into nothing, and this game will never ask you for anything. When they run out — or when you cash out — you get told what you put in, what came back, and how far that was from what the machine pays.

📜 The rules

🖨️ A card for the table

Print the rules on one sheet, fold it into a card and keep it with the chips. One side, no scissors.

🔎 What everything means