Samurai on Mega888: playing Silent Samurai one cent at a time

The lobby calls it Samurai, but the game loads with SILENT SAMURAI in gold letters under a red Japanese roof. It is a compact nine-line slot, which makes it one of the cheaper games on Mega888 to sit with for a while.

The screen

A cream rice-paper background, gold bamboo frames down both sides with line numbers, and the reels in the middle. The card symbols are A, K, Q, J and 10 drawn as if with a brush, so the Q looks almost like a kanji character and the K has a hooked stroke.

The pictures are all Japanese:

• a geisha with a white face and flowers in her hair
• a samurai warrior with a sword over his shoulder
• a gold dragon's head on a red wave background
• a bronze coin with a square hole and characters around it
• a black lacquered helmet with a red crest

In the first screenshot all nine lines are drawn over the reels in different colours, a quick way to see how they zigzag across all three rows.

A one-cent session in five screenshots

Most of our captures run a single line at a bet of 0.01. The balance ticks down one cent a spin: 101.01, 101.00, 100.99, 100.98, 100.97. Then a win lands on line 1, the middle row: two J symbols and a tile that bursts in a flash of light. A text strip under the logo reads "You won on 1 line" and "You won 0.05 on line 1", WIN shows 0.05 and the balance rises to 101.02.

That is what one-line play looks like: long, quiet, cheap, and small. It is fine for learning the symbols, but with a single line live most combinations on the top and bottom rows pay nothing.

The GAMBLE button

After that win a round red GAMBLE button with dice on it appears in the bottom right corner of the reels. We did not capture the screen behind it, but in this lobby the button normally leads to a double-or-nothing guess like the red-or-black card screen in Safari Heat. Ignore it and spin again to keep the money. On a 0.05 win the decision hardly matters, but get into the habit of deciding before you tap, not after.

Stake for a real session

With all nine lines on, the BET box read 0.90 in the first screenshot. Since one line went down to 0.01, nine lines at that same per-line level should come to 0.09 a spin, with every row in play. Settle on a spin count and use AUTO START only when you know where to stop it.

A different Japanese theme, on another platform, is Geisha Story on ACE333. The full list is on the Mega888 overview; ask for a Mega888 game ID to play.