Advantage Slots

All of your study of HooDoo Link and Hexbreaker 3 will serve you well in this final installment of Hex-style advantage games. Wheel of Fortune High Roller is a mix of Hexbreaker 3, HooDoo Link, and Wheel of Fortune and it’s another where grinders will set up base camp for the day. I’m serious when I say that; at some casinos, the same couple of people will be watching this game for hours.

Unlike with Hexbreaker 3, the columns generally move at closer to equal rates, with columns two and four being the fastest. Like Hexbreaker 3, you need a high number of ways, as the board is bigger than what you’ll see with HooDoo Link.

What’s a good baseline number to look for?

I usually want 5,000 or more ways (bottom left corner). Now, like with Hexbreaker 3 and HooDoo Link, there are exceptions in either direction. For instance, something like this is technically over 5,000 ways, but it’s one I’d pass on because the middle column is so low and the prizes I’m close to are underwhelming:

In this game, the question marks at the top of the columns are bonuses and hitting the other tops of columns will award wheel spins with different perks. The worst column tops are the ones you can see in columns two and four above. Hitting those will still bring you to a wheel spin, but you’ll have only one marker and no multipliers. Some column tops will have up to five markers, while the multipliers go from 2x to 4x at the tops of others.

Again, 95 times out of 100, that’s all just info to wow your friends at parties. Simply remembering 5,000 or more ways for Wheel of Fortune High Roller is enough.

Now, why is the number 4,500 for Hexbreaker 3 and is there anything about six-up middles for Wheel of Fortune High Roller? Great questions! There’s more going on in this game than Hexbreaker 3, which I will explain shortly. And no, six-up middles aren’t as important in this game, though they’re still nice to have.

Like with HooDoo Link and Hexbreaker 3, be wary of something like this:

That board might look scrumptious, but columns one and two were hit the previous spin, so the next spin will knock both back to three up instead of what looks like nine apiece. If you keep your eye on that number in the left corner, you want to go by what the “next game plays at,” and in this example, it’s a disappointing 2,160.

Now, here are two jarring examples of how different this game can be:

That’s a robust 16,464 ways. Nothing to explain there: Spin away, you lucky duck. But how about this one below:

That’s an anemic 405 ways. If you play something like that, you’re getting back pennies on the dollar for each bet. Pennies! To put that in perspective, if you jump on a random non-advantage game in a casino, you’ll usually get around 90 percent or so of your bet back. Hex-style games really beat the crap out of you if you play them at their low points, and I shed a tear when I see an unsuspecting fish spinning something like this example above.

One last example to go over:

This is 4,032 ways, below the 5,000 “minimum,” but we’re one away from a bonus in the fifth reel and two away from a bonus in the middle reel. Any grinder will happily play that one until at least reaching the bonus in reel five, so if you see something close enough to 5,000 and bonuses within spitting distance, it’s worth playing.

There are three (!) different bonuses with this game, and having a high number of ways greatly increases your chances at all three, along with all the line hits you’ll get along the way.

Getting three “jackpot spin” symbols will bring you to the jackpot wheel, where you spin a wheel with the following possibilities: mini, minor, major, maxi, mega, and grand. Of course, you’re most likely to hit the lower wedges.

You reach the free-games bonus by hitting three free-games symbols. Like with HooDoo Link, partial symbols are fair game and count just the same. This bonus is most similar to the previous two games, where you spin on a new board until one of the columns reaches prizes that are on the bottom. In this bonus, you occasionally reach two or even three prizes at once and that involves more wheel spinning and more chances to increase your profit.

The final bonus just involves reaching a question mark, which can occur in the base game or during the free-games bonus. The question mark gives you one wheel spin with a mystery combination of pointers and multipliers. So you could get multiple pointers all at 4x on your wheel spin. Something like that would give you a good chance at a huge hit, even though you often land on disappointing wedges on the wheel.

Because there are so many bonuses, we need to be more cautious in the base game, which is why I usually look for 5,000 or more ways for this game and 4,500 for Hexbreaker 3, even though it’s a similarly sized screen.

Congratulations! You’re now an expert on Hex-style advantage games. Here are my videos if you’d like to see more: