Ask the Slot Expert: Slot machine help screens tell all

Everything you need to know about how a slot machine works -- the winning cominations and how much they pay, how to trigger bonus features, how you win in the bonus features -- is in the machine's help screens. Manufacturers are allowed to guard payback percentages like KFC guards the Colonel's blend of 11 herbs and spices, but they have to reveal everything about how you play the game.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new, difficult to figure out, Egyptian-themed slot, King Khufu that I played.

The machine has an ancient Egyptian symbol that can appear on the reels. I bet few non-Egyptologists know the name of it. I had no idea what to call it. It's a solid blue circle flanked by two cobras.

Some images of Isis show her wearing a headdress that looks like this symbol, so I called it the headdress. Speaking with other players, they at first had no idea what I was talking about, but they didn't have a better name for the symbol.

The solid circle is the sun disk, which represents the sun god Ra (or the Aten, in the brief period of monotheism championed by Tut's father, Akhenaten). The two cobras represent Upper and Lower Egypt.

The name for this symbol that I found online is the Solar Disk Flanked by Twin Uraei.

Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.

Now, you may say, "You always say to read the help screens. Didn't you look at the help screens?"

I very quickly flipped through the help screens, but I found the number of screens to be quite daunting. I eventually took pictures of all 18 screens to look over at home.

So, what does the manufacturer call the Sun Disk Flanked by Twin Uraei? The disc.

Disc it is.

A path of squares and rectangles run around three sides of the reel display. Some of these shapes are gold. Things that look like the solid, innermost doll in a set of nesting dolls or the small, solid chocolate bunnies I got in Easter baskets travel along the path. I called these things totems.

What are the official names for the path and totems? Game board and game pieces. The positions in the game board are called tiles.

Unlike most machines, King Khufu has six reels. Like many other machines, it has three bonus features (Grow, Boost and Roll), each with a pot that fills with coins as you play and that may or may not indicate how close you are to hitting the corresponding bonus.

How you trigger those bonuses stays a mystery even after you have hit them a few times.

The machine has two other bonus features, which are much easier to know how to trigger. You win Free Games when the Khufu symbol appears on reels 2 and 5 and the Jumbo Khufu, which is so big it occupies four reel positions, is completely visible on the middle reels, reels 3 and 4.

Similarly, you trigger the Bonus Wheel feature when the Wheel symbol lands on reels 2 and 5 and the Jumbo Wheel symbol lands in the center reels.

Finally, the game has five jackpots. The Grand, and green (mini), blue (minor), purple (major), and red -- oops, I ran out of names. Most games have only four jackpots. The jackpots in decreasing value are: Grand (progressive), Red (progressive), Purple (progressive), Blue (fixed), and Green (fixed).

Triggering the Free Games and Bonus Wheel features is straightforward. The Grow, Boost, and Roll bonuses seem to hit at random with little regard to what is on the screen.

The blanket name for these bonuses is Lock and Respin because each bonus game is played on a 4x6 grid in which each grid position has a reel of coin values and when the reel stops on a coin, it locks in place and you respin. Hence, Lock and Respin. You know how it works.

The help screens demystify the ways in which you trigger the Lock and Respin bonus. One way is to land the Disc and one or more Coin or Blue or Green gem symbols on the screen.

Another way is to have one or more Coin or Blue gem or Green gem symbols on the screen AND no line wins AND no jumbo symbols. In this case, the bonus MAY be randomly triggered and the Disc symbol magically appear on the screen.

Which flavor of the bonus do you get? "The Grow feature, Roll feature, or Boost feature is randomly activated for the duration of the bonus." It's chosen at random.

No wonder there seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to how you trigger the bonus and which kind you get.

The help screens also confirm something we already knew. "An increased number of coins in the Grow, Roll, and Boost pots above the reels have no effect on game play." To put it in technical terms, they're BS.

When you've played similar bonuses, you may have noticed that some positions have many symbols flashing by and others have few. "Each unlocked symbol position is a separate reel during the bonus. Reels are determined at the start of each bonus spin and depend on the bet multiplier and number of locked reels." In other words, each position is its own reel and the reel may change from spin to spin during the bonus.

The Lock and Respin screens, all seven of them, answer the questions I had about this feature.

No mysteries in the Free Games bonus, but I did find something I didn't know. "Reels are determined at the start of each free game." Each spin in your Free Games could use a different set of reels.

In the Bonus Wheel feature, you keep spinning the wheel, winning the values displayed on the wedge under the pointer, until you land on a wedge with an Ankh symbol.

The Bonus Wheel screens explain how this feature works. "After each wheel spin, if the wheel pointer indicates a credit value or Blue or Green jackpot, 1 extra wheel spin is awarded and 2 wheel awards are replaced by" a black wedge with the Ankh symbol. "All wheel wedges containing the selected wheel awards are replaced by" a black Ankh wedge.

I had to watch a YouTube video to understand these sentences. If the wheel stops on a wedge without an Ankh, two of the award values still available on the wheel are chosen at random and changed to Ankhs. One of the values does not necessarily have to be the one you landed on. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.

The help also says that "a different wheel is used for each bet multiplier and for each wheel spin." The second part may not be much of a disclosure because some wheel wedges are changed after each spin, but I don't know if the statement also means that the probabilities of landing on a wedge changes from spin to spin.

One last Bonus Wheel tidbit. "A maximum of 7 wheel spins may be awarded." This is due to the rules of the game and the number of different values on the wheel.

There is one more feature described in the help. The Disc feature is triggered when the Disc lands on the screen without a coin or gem on the reels. One of the symbols that appears on the screen is chosen to be changed to a Wild symbol. All occurrences of that symbol and the Disc are turned into Wild symbols.

Sometimes additional symbols are turned wild too. Remember the game board and game pieces. If a game piece is on gold tile, adjacent symbols will be turned wild. There are four color-coded game pieces. The color determines which adjacent symbols will be turned, either left and right, above and below, diagonal one way or diagonal the other way.

Speaking with others, we all took quite a while to figure out why we sometimes got these bonus Wilds.

One of the biggest mysteries we have on a multi-denomination machine is whether it is better to increase the bet multiplier at a particular denomination or move up in denomination. The help screens give us a little guidance.

"Increasing the bet multiplier increases the number of gold tiles on the game board." This statement seems to indicate that we should increase our bet instead of our denomination.

"Reels are determined at the start of each base game and depend on the bet multiplier." This statement indicates that reel layouts can change within denomination.

"Increasing the bet multiplier increases the chance of winning the Red jackpot and the Purple jackpot." Another statement indicating that we might be better off increasing multiplier instead of denomination.

Of course, it's possible that we're less likely to hit one of those jackpots with a max bet at pennies than with a minimum bet at nickels or dimes. We just don't know. We do know that the probabilities improve when we increase our bet at a denomination.

Finally, "increasing the currency value of the total bet increases the chance of winning the GRAND jackpot." In other words, the probability of hitting the Grand depends on how much you're betting. The higher your bet, the higher the probability.

The help screens told me everything I wanted to know except the long-term paybacks and the probabilities of hitting the jackpots at the different bet multipliers and denominations. For those things, I need the PAR sheet.

I'm anxious to play King Khufu again. I had been playing around with minimum bets at different denominations, but now I want to try higher bets at a denomination and see how many gold tiles I have.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

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