WYRMHOARD

Eggs — the short run

Before the draw, 4 eggs are placed on numbers you did not mark. Every egg that comes out hatches. Hatch enough and a screen of covered eggs appears — open one, and it holds your number of free games:

The eggs sit on numbers you didn't take, so an egg coming out is always a coin that missed your board. That is the trade.

Chests — the long run, and the Hoard

5 chests are placed the same way, never on your numbers and never on an egg.

Land eggs and chests in the same game and you are awarded both, added together.

The Hoard Bonus

Every chest out is the rarest thing on this machine, and it is the one award that cannot pay nothing. 4 chests come up; you open one; it holds 10× to 40× your bet, in cash, and the smallest of them is still 10×.

What is inside each one is shuffled and locked before you are shown anything, so every chest is equally likely to hold every amount — there is no way to pick well and no way to pick badly. When you open one, the others open too, so you can see it.

Free games

A free game deals the same ticket you were playing, at the same bet, and costs nothing. The room changes while they run.

A free game is a full game. The eggs and chests are still there, so a free game can win more free games — the counter goes up in the middle of a run — and it can open the pick just like a paid one. That is why the eggs and chests are still worth watching once the feature has started.

The stack — free games only

Once the free games start the eggs and chests stop being triggers and start being multipliers, and a third symbol appears that exists nowhere else — the X, a coin worth one bet the moment it is drawn.

The eggs and chests multiply together, and they multiply the X's coin along with whatever you caught. Two chests short of nothing is still nothing; three chests and the X on a round that caught nothing is five bets, and every egg and every chest together is ×180.

The stack is whatever that draw put on the board. It does not carry from one free game to the next — each one starts again.

The maximum still applies

A free game is a game round, so the $800.00 limit is on it too, and the pick lands on top of whatever the round already paid.

Payback

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The theoretical return of the exact game you have set up — this bet, this many marks. It is the long-run share of everything wagered that comes back as wins, and it already counts the eggs, the lair and the maximum award.

It moves when you change your bet or your number of marks, because those are different games with different tables.

A bigger bet pays back more. The return climbs with every step up the bet ladder — from about 86% at the smallest bet to about 97% at the largest. That is the same wager buying a better game, not just bigger numbers, and this meter is where you can see it.

Speed and sound

SPEED sets how fast the coins land — slowest, slow, normal, fast, turbo. Turbo drops the whole draw in about a quarter of a second and lets the misses fall quiet, so only your hits speak. SOUND steps through off, quiet, normal and loud. Both are remembered, both are yours, and neither touches what anything pays.

Meters

Kept across sessions on this machine, the way a cabinet keeps its hard meters.

Measured return is what has actually come back so far. Over a short run it will sit well above or well below theoretical — that gap is the game, and it closes only over a very large number of plays.

Reset meters

Credits

$0.00

Demo money. This panel exists so the machine can be played for as long as you like without the credit meter getting in the way — it adds credits and nothing else. It cannot touch an outcome. What the game pays is decided by the paytable, the eggs and the chests, none of which can see this panel or the meters.

Meters

The full set, with theoretical for comparison, is on the previous page.