18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
All four cowboys disappeared.
The building responded by adding thirty-nine more squares.
Five rows became eight.
Five columns became eight.
Every ordinary payout symbol arrived in its best clothes.
Karen remained suspended above the reels in an orange crane bucket, staring down at sixty-four freshly available pieces of construction site and absolutely nobody left to construct anything.
The screen announced HEAVEN.
This was apparently the reward for achieving a workforce survival rate of zero.
A few minutes earlier, there had been four of them.
Green.
Blue.
Red.
Purple.
All wearing hard hats.
All capable of wandering across a five-by-five slab of concrete collecting coloured gems.
None showing the slightest concern about the dynamite.
I had started at €1.00 per spin with €220.00.
The site opened between two tall buildings with the reels arranged like a section of unfinished wall. Karen hovered above the left side in her crane basket with the expression of someone who had asked for a normal Tuesday and received four miniature cowboys, several sticks of explosives and a purple sphere.
The green one stood with his arms folded.
Blue looked enormously pleased to have been issued a helmet.
Red had a beard large enough to qualify as additional protective equipment.
Purple had shoulders suggesting the concrete mixer could probably be removed from the budget.
The symbols around them made no attempt to improve matters.
Dynamite.
Radios.
Hard hats.
Coloured gems.
A machine with a large X on it.
Another object resembling a can that had been designed by someone who considered paint storage insufficiently dangerous.
Then there were houses.
BONUS houses.
Small golden buildings sitting inside a larger building where four men were already apparently trying to build another building.
Concrete Cowboys had achieved property development recursively.
The first few spins paid almost nothing.
€1.20.
Nothing.
€0.80.
Nothing.
A blue gem appeared beside the blue Collector.
He moved.
That was when the site started making decisions.
He travelled through the matching gem and removed it.
Another symbol sat beyond it.
He took that as well.
The wall shifted around the cleared spaces.
Karen remained above everything.
No clipboard.
No whistle.
No intervention.
A few spins later, green had his turn.
A green gem landed two positions away with another feature symbol in his path.
He went through both.
Pieces disappeared.
New symbols arrived.
A small combination formed on the other side for €3.60.
The green cowboy ended the sequence standing farther across the wall than he had started, apparently satisfied that moving coloured rocks around a skyscraper was an acceptable use of the afternoon.
Then the payout symbols vanished.
All of them.
The board was cleared of anything that could pay.
A special screen arrived.
EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH.
Of course.
The game had watched four men remove every productive object from a building site and immediately launched an awards ceremony.
Ladders appeared.
The Collectors started climbing.
Blue went first.
Up one section.
Coin.
Another ladder.
Another coin.
Red followed from below.
Green appeared on another route.
Purple finally moved with the concentration of a man who had been told there was food upstairs.
They climbed the outside of the building while collecting coin values on the way.
No harnesses.
No scaffolding.
No visible attachment points.
Karen was still occupying the only crane basket.
€4.00 accumulated.
Then €6.40.
Red reached another coin.
€3.00.
The Employee of the Month total stopped at €13.40.
Nobody received a plaque.
Nobody received a parking space.
They were returned directly to the wall.
The balance had moved back above €215.
I kept the stake at €1.00.
The next stretch was calmer.
Radios landed beside dynamite.
Hard hats appeared without heads.
Purple gems sat near green Collectors and were ignored with the rigid professionalism of a man who knew that somebody else was responsible for purple.
Two BONUS houses landed together.
One on the second column.
One on the fourth.
They sat there glowing.
The third house never arrived.
The city already contained enough unfinished property.
Red collected a red gem.
Blue moved through another path.
A larger cluster paid €5.20.
Another sequence produced €2.80.
Then a symbol labelled Building Time appeared within blue’s route.
He collected it.
The construction site immediately decided that until this point had apparently not counted as building time.
The wall changed.
Rows became the concern.
The first filled.
A multiplier moved up.
Another sequence dropped concrete-coloured positions into place.
Second row.
Multiplier increased again.
The mini-game had turned the site into the world’s most aggressive bricklaying competition.
No bricks were visible.
There was no mortar.
One of the workers was blue.
But rows were being completed, so the building accepted it.
The final useful arrangement brought the multiplier higher once more and the total reached €22.80.
Back came the ordinary five-by-five wall.
Karen still had not descended.
At this point she had watched an employee award ceremony and an entire timed construction phase from the same orange box without once gaining access to the ground.
The next dozen or so spins were the strange quiet part.
A few payout symbols appeared in upgraded forms.
Values improved.
The Collectors continued moving when their own colours gave them something worth crossing the site for.
€4.20.
€1.60.
Nothing.
€3.40.
One dynamite symbol landed beneath red.
It did nothing dramatic on that result.
This somehow made it more threatening.
A radio appeared beside purple.
Nobody used it.
Given the available personnel, the radio could only have reached Karen anyway, and she could already see everything.
Then blue vanished.
He had been on the lower-left side during one sequence.
Symbols moved.
The result ended.
No blue Collector.
Three remained.
The site continued.
Green crossed another matching gem.
Red moved.
Purple stayed where he was.
A few spins later, green disappeared too.
There was no ceremony.
No small helmet placed beside the reels.
No interruption in construction.
Karen remained above the site.
Red and purple carried on.
The balance was still around €211.
I stopped looking at it.
Two workers were missing.
The building was now the important number.
Red disappeared after another chain.
Purple remained.
One cowboy.
Five rows.
Twenty-five positions.
Dynamite still available.
A manager overhead.
This had become less of a building project and more of an extremely colourful investigation.
Purple survived another spin.
Then another.
A purple gem landed.
He moved through it.
Something cleared behind him.
The last Collector vanished.
The reels paused.
The entire five-by-five structure disappeared.
HEAVEN.
The game expanded.
Eight by eight.
Sixty-four positions.
All the normal payout symbols arrived at maximum upgrade.
The four workers had finally found a construction site with more room.
They simply had to die to get transferred there.
The background brightened.
The smaller objects that had spent most of the session looking like tools, site equipment and brightly coloured hazards now filled the larger grid in upgraded form.
Combinations formed everywhere.
€7.20.
Another arrangement connected.
€11.40.
More symbols arrived.
The eight-by-eight area kept resolving with the density of a skyscraper that had suddenly discovered the planning department no longer existed.
A larger hit formed through the centre.
€18.60.
Another followed lower down.
€9.80.
The total continued.
I watched sixty-four positions fill with the best versions of symbols that had previously been sharing twenty-five squares with four men and a suspicious amount of dynamite.
Heaven was not peaceful.
Heaven had increased capacity.
The strongest sequence came late.
Upgraded symbols spread across several sections.
One group connected.
Then another.
The amount climbed by €24.40 before smaller pieces finished around it.
The Heaven total reached €86.20.
That did it.
The entire session had now pushed the balance to €306.80.
The screen returned to the ordinary construction site.
Five by five again.
Karen was still in the crane bucket.
And all four Collectors were back.
Blue stood near the bottom.
Green had returned with his arms folded.
Red had his beard.
Purple had somehow retained his shoulders.
Nobody carried a halo.
Nobody appeared concerned that the previous shift had ended with all four of them dead.
The spin button remained untouched.
For one session, the site had cleared itself, held an Employee of the Month ceremony, built several rows under multiplier conditions, lost its entire workforce, opened an eight-by-eight afterlife and then put everybody straight back on the morning shift.
Karen still had the best safety equipment.
She was forty feet above them.
Train to Rio Grande responds to confidence with cold silence.