Community Slots:Creating Competition
A look at the new phenomone, community slots. This article talks about how to make the most out of community slot play.
Do you remember the game Sigma Derby, where players surrounded a track with mechanical horses? Players would make their bets, the horses would race and you’d hear cheers from the winners and groans from the losers.
I first encountered it in the 1980s in Las Vegas. If we were to define the Derby as a slot machine, you could say it was the start of community-style gaming on the slots. But it had no spinning reels, just horses spinning out of the turn, so the real — or reel — beginnings of “we’re-all-in-this-together” slot play has to be moved up to 1996.
“When you look at community games, we brought the first one out about 12 years ago, called Road Rally,” said A.C. Coin president and founder Mac Seelig. “So we’re a great believer in that, as you can see in the products the company’s putting out (such as the community games Super Bankroll and Slingo Bonus Deluxe).”
Just a couple of years later, Anchor Gaming promoted Fishin’ Buddies, the first use of video slots with a community bonus. Anchor, which has since merged into IGT, was known for its creative take on slots. One of Anchor’s other products was Wheel of Gold, which placed a tower with a bonus wheel atop slant-top, reel-spinning slot machines. That bonus wheel captured the imaginations of players and slot designers alike. It was licensed by IGT and turned into the Wheel of Fortune game that slot players know and love today.
Nowadays, making the slots a more social experience is no small niche. It’s a mainstream way of getting players excited about the games. Everyone seems to have a different idea on how to put the thrills into community-style slot play.
In launching its Community Gaming product line a couple of years ago, WMS Gaming went for a “we’re all in this together” approach, with all players going to a bonus event together, all rooting for the same outcome. International Game Technology (IGT), with Wheel of Fortune Super Spin and A.C. Coin, with Super Bankroll, went a different route. Players sit around a huge wheel or bankroll cylinder, but while more than one player can get in on a bonus spin, not everyone qualifies at once, and players at different positions get different bonuses.
There are key differences in the two approaches. In Wheel of Fortune Super Spin, if two or more players qualify for the bonus spin at about the same time, they can push their buttons and opt to get in on the same spin of the giant reel. Or they can wait to spin in turn. If you want to get in on the same spin as another player, you can do that. If not, just wait and you can push the button to start a new spin after the last is over and players have collected their bonuses.
Even if several players opt to play the same bonus round, they won’t be rooting for the wheel to stop in the same place. Each player has his or her own indicator that points to a wheel segment at the end of the spin. If three players are in on the bonus round, and the wheel stops so that one indicator points to 100 credits, one points to 250, and one points to 1,000, well, I want to be sitting in the 1,000-credit seat.
The WMS approach, launched with Monopoly Big Event, is different. There, all active players at a bank of machines go to the bonus round together. There’s no waiting for the next time — winning together is part of the fun. There are six community events built into the game, with the longest and most profitable being Once Around. In a classic take on WMS’ Monopoly series, eligible players get in on a trip around the Monopoly board on a giant plasma screen. An animated Mr. Monopoly rolls the dice, taking everyone to the same properties for bonus credits. Everyone is rooting for the key rolls together — everyone wants to land on Boardwalk or Park Place for the biggest bonuses.
That everyone profits on the same rolls does not mean everyone will wind up with the same bonus total. Base rewards are the same but are multiplied depending both on your bet size and speed of play. A display on the machine tells you how big your multiplier is as you play on the video reels, and you can watch the multiplier increase or decrease as you speed or slow your play.
The formats are evolving. WMS has added a competitive element in Reel ’Em In: Compete to Win. IGT has a timer, telling players when a bonus event is coming and hurrying them to collect entries in its Star Wars community game. And Bally Technologies has a game for those whose preferred community has room for just two players in its new DualVision product.
A couple of the hottest games A.C. Coin has ever had — Super Bankroll and Slingo Bonus Deluxe — are community-style type games. In Super Bankroll, players at five-reel IGT Double Diamond base games sit around a central cylinder that depicts columns of currency. In the big bonus event, the cylinder spins and your bonus is based on the column of cash that stops in front of you. Slingo Bonus Deluxe has more of a game show feel, with a 42-inch plasma screen that serves as a gameboard for the community bonus above each bank of three machines.
In the last few years, WMS has taken a leading role in pushing the play-together games ahead, exploring the possibilities in its Community Gaming line. And with Bally, Atronic and Konami all wanting a piece of the community action, you will be seeing a multitude of takes on shared slot experiences in the coming year. Here are a few of the latest and greatest:
Reel ’em In: Compete to Win (WMS Gaming) was the first big hit video slot for WMS in 1997, giving the company a boost at a time when it was struggling with patent issues on its reel-spinning slots. The theme’s success over the years makes it only natural that WMS would turn to the fishing theme for community-style play.
What’s different about Compete to Win is, well, the competition. In introducing its Community Gaming line, WMS first turned out Monopoly Big Event, in which players won together on events including a trip around the Monopoly board. Everyone was rooting for the dice to take the whole group to those big properties.
In Reel ’em In: Compete to Win, everyone goes to the fishing round together, but they won’t all be rooting for the same fish. Each fish is assigned a point value, and when you see a big-value fish swim onto the plasma screen overhead, the anticipation builds as players wonder if it’ll bite — and whose fisherman will reel it in. The player with the most points at the end of the round not only wins the accumulated credits, but gets an extra bonus reward for winning the derby.
In Powerball Power Seat (WMS Gaming), the single-player Powerball game, based on a lottery game with red, white and blue balls, has led to a community-style game with a gimmick: the Power Seat. When the bonus round is triggered, any player sitting in a designated Power Seat can have his or her bonus multiplied by 1, 3, 5 or 10 times. Base games are five-reel video slots, with a huge plasma screen Powerball display overhead. When a mystery controller triggers the bonus round, lottery-type balls are released, displaying bonus credits. The final ball can bring credits, multiply earlier credits or take the group to one of four community bonus events.
With Big Event Poker (WMS Gaming), for the first time, video poker players can get in on the fun of winning together. The multiple-game machines include standard video poker games. It takes some minor deciphering of names to get where you want to go — Four of a Kind Poker is the game we usually see as Bonus Poker, Double Four of a Kind Poker is Double Bonus Poker, and so on. A two-credit side bet gives you a chance at going to a bonus event that can be triggered by any player at the bank of games. There are five bonus events, including Big Event Four to a Royal, in which every player at the bank starts with four cards to a royal flush. Each then gets a random draw out of a separate deck of the remaining 48 cards — each has one in 48 chance at a royal.
When you see slot cabinets with an R2D2 look about them, you know IGT has given us another game in the “Star Wars” series, and this one’s name is Star Wars MLP. The “MLP” is for multi-level progressive — there’s a multilevel community bonus tied into the “Speeder Chase” shared bonus. In the bonus, each player gets a Speeder bike that races across screens both on individual games and on the giant plasma display overhead, with a chance at one of the progressive jackpots.
Only players who have earned entries go to the Speeder Chase event, which goes off every eight minutes, so it’s important to keep spinning right up until event time. The winner of the chase not only gets bonus credits, but advances into a round of destroying enemy ships for a chance at the five-level progressive jackpots.
OK, community gaming is a hot new field in the slots, but what if your preferred community is two people? Well DualVision (Bally Technologies) is a slot machine built for two. There’s a wide chair for two to sit, and there are two sets of video reels on the screen. Even though players may wager different amounts, there is one credit meter — clearly, this is for husband-wife, significant others or good friends who are willing to play off a common bankroll. Game play is independent, but when one triggers the bonus round, both get bonus play. Should both trigger the bonus event at the same time, payoffs are doubled. For now, both players must play the same game in the initial release called Two for the Money. Under consideration is the possibility of allowing choices of different games, even allowing one to play video poker while the other plays video slots.
The TV game show “Deal or No Deal” has been very good to Atronic. The company was early on the licensing, securing rights to theme before the show had ever aired in the United States, when Europe was its natural market. Thus the slot game Deal or No Deal now exists.
Now that the theme has been a hit in a variety of single-player games, Atronic is entering Deal or No Deal in the community gaming segment. When players go to the bonus round together, they choose suitcases containing bonus credit amounts, then see who winds up with the beat deal.
The Deal or No Deal community game has a 12-minute countdown to the bonus round, but you can’t just sit there for 11 minutes without playing and expect to collect bonuses. To qualify, you have to collect enough cases during regular spins of the reels.
It almost seems we’ve come full circle, back to the beginnings of Sigma Derby, as a couple of manufacturers bring us slot games, Beat the Field (Konami) and Sport of Kings (Multimedia Games), with horse-racing bonus rounds. There are differences of course. The horses are on video screens now instead of mechanical figures racing around the track, and you’re not just betting on the races. It takes spins of the reels to get to the shared bonus event.
Beat the Field has a four-level mystery progressive jackpot and is available, with both reel-spinning and video base games. The main bonus event is a horse-racing run for the roses, with players allocated horses based on bet level. The winner in each race brings a progressive, while other players win consolation credits. Everyone wins something together.
In Sport of Kings, as customers play a video-reel base game, they collect entries to a horse race. When time for the race comes, all at the bank go to the race on the overhead screen together. Players must play all 20 lines on the base game, plus a wager of half the total line bet, to be eligible for the racing event. Timing of the races is operator configurable, at approximately every 10 minutes.
The cheering as horses round the turn shouts “community gaming.” Just like in the old days. It’s good to know that some things will never change.
By John Grochowski
Syndicated gaming columnist John Grochowski has been covering the casino industry for 15 years in his weekly column distributed to newspapers and websites. He’s also the author of six books, including “The Slot Machine Answer Book” and “The Video Poker Answer Book.” You can find him online at www.casinoanswerman.com.
