18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The pirate had been dead for several centuries and still had a drinking problem.
That seemed unnecessarily committed.
His skull occupied the middle of the screen beneath a huge black hat, one eye glowing red, the other replaced by something metallic, while green fire leaked around him and two ghost ships slowly dissolved into the background.
He had no skin.
He had no functioning digestive system.
He had, however, retained access to grog.
I started with €220.00 and set the stake to €1.20.
The reels were five across and four high, surrounded by chains, rotten timber and enough green supernatural light to suggest that the ocean had recently made a very poor decision.
There were anchors.
Pistols.
Skulls.
Gold coins.
Barrels.
A ghost ship.
And bottles of the luminous green stuff that had apparently survived death better than the crew.
The Buy Feature button sat off to one side.
I left it there.
A pirate who had already gone to Hell and come back with his own rum supply could earn my €1.20 naturally.
For a while, he made a surprisingly weak case.
The first sixteen spins cost €19.20 and returned €7.20.
A few anchors lined up.
Two skulls repeatedly arrived with no third skull, which seemed ridiculous given the local population.
A small ghost-ship win paid €2.40.
The bottles appeared often enough to maintain concern but not often enough to improve anything.
My balance reached €208.00.
The captain continued grinning.
He had the enormous permanent smile of somebody for whom dental decay was no longer a meaningful threat.
Spin seventeen landed three Grog Barrels across the middle.
They paid.
Then one of them cracked.
Green liquid ran sideways across the reels.
Not down.
Sideways.
Apparently gravity had also died at sea.
The grog touched an anchor and a pistol.
Both symbols flashed green.
Both turned Wild.
The reels checked themselves again.
A new combination connected through the two contaminated positions.
More green fire.
€13.20.
My balance returned to exactly €220.00.
Sixteen spins of gradual deterioration had been repaired by one broken barrel leaking sideways into a firearm.
There are economic systems with worse foundations.
I kept the stake at €1.20.
The captain had now established an important principle.
His alcohol was more useful outside the bottle.
The next eight spins became an experiment in waiting for another accident.
A barrel landed beside a skull.
Nothing.
Two bottles appeared around an anchor.
Nothing.
A ghost ship crossed the first three reels and paid €2.40.
The captain remained behind the reels, glowing green and clearly withholding the part where liquor violated basic geometry.
By the time the balance reached €212.80, I had begun watching every barrel more closely than the actual premium symbols.
That was when six gold coins landed.
They were not ordinary coins.
Each had a number stamped across it.
The reels darkened.
Chains snapped across the edges.
The ghost ships behind the game seemed to move closer.
Three respins appeared.
The balance sat at €211.60.
Grog to Hell Hold and Win had finally stopped pretending this was primarily a maritime drinking incident.
The six coins stayed in place.
1x.
2x.
2x.
3x.
3x.
4x.
Fifteen times the stake.
There were still plenty of empty spaces around them.
The first respin added nothing.
Three became two.
The second dropped a 5x coin into the top corner.
Back to three.
Then a 2x arrived.
Then nothing.
Then 4x.
Then 1x.
Every fresh coin restored the count to three, and the screen gradually changed from cursed shipwreck to the world’s least trustworthy treasure chest.
The visible coins now held 27x.
The captain leaned over them from above.
His red eye glowed.
The metal eye did whatever a metal pirate eye does when wealth becomes available.
Another symbol dropped.
It was a barrel.
Not a coin value.
A small green flame crawled around its rim.
The barrel tipped.
Grog poured across two nearby doubloons.
Of all the supernatural questions available to the session, the pirate had once again selected alcohol.
A 2x coin doubled.
A 4x coin doubled.
Six more times the stake entered the pile.
33x.
The barrel vanished.
This liquid had now improved a pistol, an anchor and legal tender.
I no longer saw any reason for the pirate to drink it.
He should have been pouring it on the ship.
The respins continued.
One empty result.
Another.
The counter fell to one.
The grid was reasonably full but nowhere near complete.
No huge coin had arrived.
No enormous jackpot emblem had kicked the door off the screen.
There was simply 33x worth of cursed money sitting in green fire.
The final respin began.
A skull landed.
Not the normal skull.
The captain’s face appeared inside a black coin surrounded by chains.
Every regular doubloon flashed.
The 33x sitting on the grid was counted.
A chest beneath the reels opened.
33x appeared inside it.
The skull had copied the entire pile.
66x.
The respin count returned to three.
This was piracy with very little ambiguity.
He had looked at his own treasure, made another copy of it and placed both versions under his supervision.
Death had apparently removed whatever hesitation was left.
The next respin produced a 2x coin.
68x.
Three spins again.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I stared at the last empty spaces.
The captain stared at them too, although with only one conventional eye.
The final respin landed blank.
The chains loosened.
The coins shook.
Everything was collected.
68x at €1.20 produced €81.60.
My balance climbed to €293.20.
The pirate threw his head back while green fire rolled behind the reels.
His jaw was already permanently open, so this required less animation than it might have for a living man.
I stayed at €1.20.
There was no reason to raise the stake.
The dead captain had just copied his own money because a barrel of cursed alcohol told him to.
I wanted to see how he behaved after success.
The answer was: much the same.
A skull.
An anchor.
Two pistols.
A bottle.
Nothing.
Another spin gave me a small €1.20 win.
A later ghost ship returned €2.40.
Across nine paid spins, €10.80 went in and €3.60 came back.
No second Hold & Win arrived.
One set of five coins landed, which was close enough to make the chains twitch around the screen before the sixth position filled with an anchor instead.
The captain watched that anchor arrive.
I watched the captain.
The anchor remained an anchor.
Nobody poured grog on it.
A missed opportunity all around.
The balance settled at €286.00.
I had started with €220.00.
The feature had done most of the work, but the moment I kept returning to was still spin seventeen.
Not the 33x copy.
Not the chest.
Not the six trigger coins.
A barrel had broken.
Its contents had travelled horizontally.
A pistol and an anchor had become Wild.
My entire early loss had disappeared.
The last screen showed one green bottle near the bottom-right corner.
Nothing connected to it.
No barrel broke.
No ghost ship moved.
The pirate was still grinning above the reels.
€286.00 remained in the balance.
The bottle stayed sealed.
For the first time all session, that seemed like the dangerous option.
Witches Tome gave me a respin — and took my last shred of hope.