18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The final potato had three eyes.
Two were ordinary potato eyes.
The third appeared to be judging me.
I had €201.20.
It had survived.
That was effectively the result.
About forty minutes earlier I had opened the game with €200.00, selected €1.20 and found a cellar apparently abandoned after somebody discovered refrigeration but decided not to tell the vegetables.
Sacks leaned against damp timber.
Roots hung from the ceiling.
A shovel was wedged into one corner.
There were worms.
There were flies.
There were potatoes in several stages of what could generously be described as personal decline.
One of them had gone green.
Another had sprouted.
One appeared to have developed a mouth.
The main Rotten Potato symbol looked as though it had spent six weeks behind a cupboard and emerged with new political ambitions.
I pressed spin.
The reels filled with beetles, carrots, sacks, garden tools and potatoes.
A cluster disappeared.
New symbols dropped.
Nothing unusual.
Another small cluster vanished.
Still normal.
Then a rotten potato landed beside a winning group.
The win cleared.
The potato twitched.
A patch of green mould spread into the space beside it.
Two neighbouring symbols changed into potatoes.
I looked at the screen a little longer than was strictly required.
One diseased vegetable had just infected a carrot.
The carrot had accepted this immediately.
There had been no resistance.
The new potatoes helped form another cluster, which paid and disappeared.
That first incident was worth only €1.20.
Financially, almost nothing had happened.
Agriculturally, control had been lost.
I continued.
The next several spins remained fairly quiet.
A few beetle clusters.
Some tools.
Occasional potatoes that landed nowhere useful and simply sat there looking unfit for soup.
A Potato Sack appeared once on reel two.
Later another landed on reel five.
Never three.
The cellar had apparently organised its sacks according to the same principle used by people who own seventeen socks and no matching pairs.
After eighteen spins I had spent €21.60 and recovered €9.60.
€188.00 remained.
The potato had taken €12.00 from me without achieving anything more sophisticated than localised mould.
I kept the stake at €1.20.
There was no reason to escalate against produce.
Spin nineteen began with eight potatoes landing across the lower half of the reels.
Some healthy.
Some questionable.
One clearly beyond discussion.
The cluster connected.
€3.60.
The winning potatoes vanished.
The rotten one did not.
Green rot spread upward and left.
Three symbols changed.
More potatoes.
They connected with four fresh ones that had just dropped.
Another cluster.
€4.80.
The second cascade cleared.
The same rotten potato remained in place.
A tiny green sprout pushed out of its head.
I had seen slot Wilds arrive as lightning bolts, gods, cowboys, wolves, diamonds, dragons and various mammals with employment problems.
This Wild had germinated.
The potato stretched slightly.
Its eyes opened wider.
A small WILD label appeared under it.
Apparently surviving three consecutive incidents of decomposition qualified a root vegetable for promotion.
Fresh symbols dropped around it.
The new Sprout Wild connected two potato groups that otherwise would have remained separate.
They became one large mass.
The screen shook.
Several of the potatoes collapsed into pale yellow mash.
A x2 appeared in the middle of it.
€7.20.
The mash remained behind.
This raised an obvious question.
Who had mashed it?
There was no cook.
No kitchen.
No visible human presence at all.
There was a shovel.
There were worms.
There was one increasingly successful potato.
Somewhere between cascade three and cascade four, the cellar had prepared a side dish.
More symbols fell.
The Sprout Wild stayed.
A fresh rotten potato appeared on the opposite side.
That one spread Rot immediately after another small potato connection cleared.
Two more symbols became potatoes.
One landed directly through the x2 Mash Spot.
Another large cluster formed.
A second patch of mash appeared.
x3.
The game paused.
The x2 lit up.
The x3 lit up.
Potatoes filled most of the centre of the screen.
The original Sprout Wild was still among them, looking substantially healthier now that everything around it had become diseased.
The final cascade paid €15.60.
The whole spin had returned €31.20.
My balance moved from €186.80 after the stake to €218.00.
I had started that spin with eight potatoes.
I finished it €30.00 richer because one of them refused to leave, grew hair and infected the vegetables around it until the game produced mashed multipliers.
The cellar settled.
The next spin loaded ordinary symbols again.
A carrot.
A beetle.
A shovel.
Two sacks.
One healthy potato.
The previous agricultural catastrophe had apparently been local.
I stayed at €1.20.
From that point onward, every rotten potato became the centre of the screen.
A premium symbol could land and I barely cared.
A sack could tease the bonus.
Fine.
I was watching the potato.
One landed beside a beetle cluster.
The beetles disappeared.
The Rot went the wrong way and converted only one symbol.
No new cluster.
Dead.
Another potato survived two cascades.
On the third drop it disappeared before sprouting.
That felt excessive.
It had been one cascade away from discovering a career.
Two Potato Sacks landed together several spins later.
The reels darkened slightly.
The cellar door behind the reels shifted.
Something thumped from the other side.
The third sack never came.
Instead, a carrot landed.
Not even a rotten carrot.
A perfectly respectable carrot had prevented access to whatever was making noises behind a locked cellar door.
I continued.
The balance slid gradually from €218.00.
There were several small returns, €1.20 here, €2.40 there, one €1.80 cluster of worms that briefly made the entire lower-left corner look like the soil itself had decided to leave.
But the large infection did not repeat.
Fifteen spins cost €18.00 and returned €5.40.
€205.40 remained.
I was still ahead.
More importantly, the game had established that the potato incident had not been normal enough to happen every four minutes.
That helped.
Three consecutive giant mould avalanches would have turned the original one into routine agricultural maintenance.
I gave it five more spins.
The first produced nothing.
The second landed another pair of Potato Sacks.
One on the far left.
One on the far right.
The cellar door shuddered again.
A beetle occupied the middle.
The bonus stayed underground.
Spin three produced a €1.80 cluster involving carrots.
No Rot.
No sprout.
No mash.
Just carrots behaving exactly as vegetables had behaved for thousands of years.
They suddenly seemed underdeveloped.
Spin four brought one rotten potato into the top-left corner.
Nothing connected to it.
It remained there after the reels settled.
Green.
Soft.
Unproductive.
Spin five began.
The rotten potato disappeared.
A different one landed in the exact centre.
No winning cluster surrounded it.
No Rot spread.
No Potato Sack appeared.
No cellar door moved.
The screen stopped.
€201.20.
One stake more than I had started with.
The feature had never triggered.
The cellar had never opened.
No proper bonus had occurred at all.
Instead, one spin in the middle of the session had allowed a potato to survive long enough to sprout, infect its neighbours, assist in several wins and somehow cause large areas of the reels to be mashed into multipliers.
The final potato sat alone in the centre.
Three eyes.
One tiny green shoot.
No win attached to it.
I left it exactly where it was.
After forty minutes, I had learned enough not to disturb a potato that looked as though it had plans.
Zeus vs Hades Gods of War 250 made me feel like a spreadsheet with feelings.