18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The magician had disappeared so completely that the circus sent two of his hats onstage and hoped nobody would notice he was missing.
They appeared on the second and third reels, moving together before stopping in exactly the same positions. Two purple top hats, two sets of feathers, not a single magician.
No payment either.
I pressed spin again.
If the hats were going to perform the entire show themselves, I wanted to see whether one could pull a lion out of the other.
Instead, three purple playing cards lined up for €0.10.
Ten cents for a card trick involving no magician, no hands and absolutely no effort to hide the cards.
The circus lights were blazing. There were golden pillars, red curtains and a cannon large enough to fire something considerably more interesting than playing cards.
The lion was available.
He had an enormous orange mane, a red top hat decorated with feathers and a pink ball he seemed particularly attached to. His mouth was wide open, showing enough teeth to make a circus audience reconsider sitting in the front row.
I would have paid good money to see him enter the cannon.
Unfortunately, the reels preferred card tricks.
Four blue diamonds managed €0.50 a few spins later. The magician was still missing, and the lion hadn’t made any attempt to climb inside anything except his own enormous hat.
I’d set the stake at €1.25, and the first few spins had been mostly cheap entertainment.
The interesting thing was how often two reels decided to copy each other.
Sometimes they carried matching cards. Sometimes matching circus equipment appeared together, as though the performers had discovered that a second identical prop was considerably easier to arrange than an actual second performer.
The magician had two hats.
Nobody had a magician.
Then four juggling-pin symbols connected.
€1.50.
At last, something that belonged in a circus rather than a deck of cards.
The pins were brightly coloured, decorated with little stars and hearts, ready for someone to throw them into the air.
Nobody did.
There wasn’t even a juggler on the reels.
Four perfectly good juggling pins had appeared, formed a paying line and disappeared without anybody attempting to catch one.
I was starting to wonder whether the lion had eaten all the performers.
He certainly had the teeth for it.
The cannon was still there, looking magnificent and achieving absolutely nothing. It had a large barrel, bright colours and little wheels that suggested somebody could move it into position if they ever found something worth firing.
The juggling pins would have been suitable ammunition.
The magician’s hats would have fitted inside.
The lion would have been my first choice, although fitting his enormous mane through the barrel might have required some encouragement.
The next few spins produced the occasional card combination without the slightest sign of anybody being launched across the tent.
Then three drums connected.
€0.25.
A quarter of a euro for an entire percussion performance.
The drums had sticks attached to them. Nobody needed to find a drummer; the equipment was practically ready to play itself.
But the sticks stayed where they were.
Four juggling pins had refused to juggle.
Three drums had refused to drum.
The cannon had refused to fire.
And the lion was sitting on his pink ball, wearing a top hat, apparently convinced he was already the star of the evening.
He was beginning to have a point.
The cards kept arriving.
Green clubs, purple spades, red hearts and blue diamonds occupied the reels in changing combinations. Some came close to paying, while others formed lines that stopped just before the final symbol.
The cannon occasionally appeared beside them, which did nothing to improve its usefulness.
Five green clubs eventually connected for €3.
Three euros from a row of playing cards.
The magician had now managed to earn more money through his missing equipment than several actual circus props had produced.
If somebody finally found him, I hoped they wouldn’t tell him. He might decide to stay missing permanently.
A couple of ticket Scatters also appeared during that stretch, but never enough together to start the Free Games.
There was something particularly fitting about a circus distributing admission tickets for an attraction it hadn’t quite managed to organise.
Two tickets could be waved around all evening.
Without the third, nobody got the extra performance.
By the eighteenth spin, my €41.10 starting balance had fallen to just under €24.
The lion had still not entered the cannon.
The magician had not returned.
The juggling pins had earned €1.50 without being juggled.
And I was about to make the sort of decision that should probably be discouraged by anyone who has ever watched a circus animal with access to explosives.
I switched on Super Bet.
The stake doubled to €2.50.
If the circus was going to continue producing identical hats and decorative cannons, I wanted the chance of a more spectacular act.
The next spin brought three red heart cards.
€0.20.
I’d doubled the price of admission, and the circus had responded by producing twenty cents from some playing cards.
The red hearts couldn’t even pretend to be interesting. They were perfectly ordinary cards, the kind a magician might have used if he hadn’t vanished before the performance started.
The following spin finally brought four drums together.
€5.
Five euros for a proper collection of drums.
No drummer appeared to collect the applause.
I pictured the lion being placed in front of them with a pair of sticks. He could have played a tune, balanced on his ball and knocked a magician’s hat into the audience.
Instead, another spin went by without paying.
And then the lion decided he’d had enough of being a normal-sized circus animal.
The first and fifth reels synchronised, producing matching juggling-pin positions at opposite ends.
More juggling pins landed between them.
The fourth reel received the lion.
He expanded.
One small lion symbol suddenly occupied the entire reel, stretching from top to bottom with his enormous hat, orange mane and ridiculous grin taking over every position.
He was carrying x2.
A line of five juggling pins had formed, with the expanded lion filling the missing position.
The ordinary five-pin payment at that stake was €12.50.
The lion doubled it.
€25.
Twenty-five euros from a juggling act in which the only actual performer was a lion standing on a pink ball.
He hadn’t caught a single pin.
He hadn’t thrown one.
He had simply grown tall enough to occupy an entire reel and demanded twice the money.
Finally, Cirque Du Habanero had produced an act worth watching.
The cannon could forget about firing anything.
The lion had discovered that getting bigger was considerably more profitable than being fired through the air.
The magician’s hat hadn’t been necessary either.
The lion was already wearing a better one, complete with feathers, while the missing magician presumably sat somewhere wondering why his equipment had been replaced by a giant orange cat.
I would have happily watched the lion perform the same trick again.
There was room for more absurdity.
He could have expanded across the drums and made an entire percussion section out of one animal.
He could have stood between two cannons, multiplying their payments while refusing to climb into either.
He could have taken over the magician’s act and produced more lions from the spare hats.
But the next few spins brought ordinary cards again.
The lion had delivered his performance and disappeared from the paying combinations.
One spin produced five purple spades.
€1.50.
Five cards had managed to align themselves perfectly, but the missing magician remained completely unnecessary.
Another brought a scattering of juggling equipment that couldn’t quite form a proper line.
I had paid €2.50 for that spin.
The circus responded with the same assortment of props it had been using before the stake increase, only now they cost twice as much to watch.
Then three cannons finally appeared together.
Three.
An entire collection of little red-and-gold artillery pieces.
€1.
One euro.
I’d spent a considerable portion of the session trying to persuade the circus to do something worthwhile with a cannon, and now three of them had managed to earn less than the four drums.
They hadn’t fired.
They hadn’t moved.
They were simply standing there, looking ready to send something flying across the big top.
Even a magician’s hat would have been acceptable.
I would have settled for a juggling pin.
The lion’s pink ball would have made a splendid projectile, although I suspected the lion would have objected to losing it.
The cannons disappeared with the spin.
The magician remained missing.
And the third Scatter ticket still hadn’t arrived to open another attraction.
Eight Super Bet spins had been enough.
I switched it off and returned to €1.25.
The lion’s €25 performance had been lovely, but I didn’t need to keep paying double for a chance to watch more playing cards and cannons standing around.
A few ordinary spins remained.
The first produced nothing useful. The reels stopped with a collection of cards and circus objects that refused to cooperate.
Another brought three cannons.
€0.50.
Half a euro from three cannons.
They were now earning less than a single magician’s hat might have produced in a proper combination.
I wanted somebody to climb into one.
The lion.
The magician.
A drum.
Anything.
Instead, the circus continued presenting them as perfectly normal pieces of equipment that happened to pay occasionally.
The next spin brought no winning combination.
There were colourful cards, a few juggling pins and another reminder that owning a magnificent cannon was not the same thing as knowing how to use it.
Then the thirtieth spin arrived.
Four magician’s hats lined up.
€3.
Four hats.
Three euros.
The missing magician had finally managed his most successful appearance of the evening without appearing at all.
There was enough headwear on the reels to dress an entire troupe, and not a single performer had come forward to claim it.
The lion had already taken the best hat.
He’d also taken the best payment.
The cannons had contributed almost nothing despite being perfectly capable of looking dangerous for thirty spins.
I finished with €35.15 from the €41.10 I’d started with.
The circus had cost me €5.95.
For that, I’d watched two reels impersonate each other, four juggling pins perform without a juggler, several drums stand around waiting to be hit, a collection of cannons refuse to fire and a lion grow into an entire reel to earn €25.
The final four hats sat on the reels.
The magician never appeared.
If somebody eventually found him backstage, I’d have one question.
Why had he bothered learning magic when the lion could get twice the money just by standing up?
The feature teased. I leaned in. King Carrot pulled the rug.