Grand Casino of Fortune

This is another Hosted Game that goes completely off the beaten track with its own mindset. So, another caveat here that while it's not what I was seeking when I started playing Hosted Games, I believe it achieves its goals well of providing a progressive strategic gambling experience.

You enter a casino with 5 floors, and are given some tokens. Each floor becomes progressively more strategic.

Floor 1 is purely random, with games like roulette or lotteries. Higher floors include things from Blackjack to poker all the way to a variant of Risk.

I get easily addicted to things (and so do my family) so I generally do my best not to enjoy gambling, so I was at odds with the game's desire to be entertaining to me. Instead, I tried to maximize my success.

The game is like a reverse casino, because you have an inherent luck trait that gives you an edge over the house. Once I realized that, it was easy to get past the first few floors. The reason casinos work so well is that the law of large numbers says that the longer people play, the closer their winning average is to the theoretical average. And every casino game is designed so that the house, on average, wins. That's why high rollers get so many perks; the longer they stay in the casino, the more likely they are to lose it all.

In this game, you have the edge. So, for instance, I can just go to roulette and pick any bet and blindly play over and over again until it gets high enough, then increase the bet and repeat. The standard deviation isn't 0, so you can run out of money, but there's a bank with infinite loan amounts with no interest, just repaying.

Blackjack was easier since I learned how to deal it for a fake school casino event. Poker became a little harder; it's 7 card poker (2 in your hand, 5 on the table) and you can pick the best hand of 5 cards, so flushes almost always won.

Commander, on 4th floor, is the one that really got me. I wanted to rush through since I had been playing an hour longer than I had planned to, and it has a system where you have to guarantee you know whether a certain hand will win or lose, as well as winning 3 out of 5 hands each round. I eventually realized a way to guarantee I'd know.

Each floor has minimal story, with an option or two to get a little text. I did like the building up of the story over time, and the shape of the plot arc is solid.

There are essentially no advantages to the text format here; seeing the cards would have helped a lot. I realize that the graphical gambling game market is already heavily saturated, but if you take an overly common game format and remove helpful features, it doesn't bring extreme joy. IF often thrives when it does what graphics can't or allows much more content than the artists of a graphical game could be paid to create (and that is achieved here in the narrative portions, just not the rest).

The progression worked well for me, although like I said commander was pretty hard for me. I don't think that the author could have done better with the goal in mind (to make a text-only progressive gambling casino with a focus on games and a de-emphasis on narrative).

Like Interactive Bonbons, Grand Casino of Fortune presents you a bunch of minigames. While Interactive Bonbons had plenty of technical skill on display, this game is a little more low-key in this department, offering a couple of gambling minigames with less razzle dazzle. Still, there are a number of interestingly designed minigames here, along with RPG elements such as characters you can speak to to unlock certain bonuses (if Lady Luck happens to smile on you), as well as multiple levels of progression.

The first floor is easy enough to pass with patience and mindless tapping. Subsequent floors present games which will require some brainpower to complete. Still, I gave up at the fourth (penultimate) floor as the minigame there was just way too hard for me. (You need to win the minigame three times in a row to pass). The ending is interesting, but may or may not be worth the pulled hairs to reach it. (I just opened up the code.)

I liked a couple of things here, such the various floors, the ability to borrow cash and the other folks you could speak to for lore or bonuses in between the gambling games. That said, you’ll need better luck than me if you want to complete this legitimately, and going by the number of omnibus ratings, not many folks made it past the fourth floor. Still, it’s something enjoyable you can play around with.