Citrus Circuit

The grid

Three columns, three rows. Nine cells, all of them visible, and no second screen behind them.

The five paths

Three straight rows and two crossing diagonals. Every path is live on every round — there is no switch to turn any of them off.

Reading a round

A path pays when the same glyph fills it from the left column onward. The wild counts as whichever glyph the path already started with.

Your stake

Rewards in the table are multiples of your stake, divided across the five paths. Raising the stake raises every reward by the same factor and changes nothing else.

Rewards below are multiples of your stake.

Where the return comes from

Each glyph sits on the strip a fixed number of times. Multiply how often a path can fill with a glyph by what that fill pays, add up all five paths, and you have the long-run return printed above.

Why the swings are small

Only five paths can pay, and the largest reward is a few hundred times the stake. Rounds land close to each other, which is what low volatility means in practice.

What a run of losses tells you

Nothing about the next round. The strip has no memory of what it drew, and no count of how long it has been since a glyph appeared.

Where the grid came from

The first paying machines had three physical wheels and one line across the middle, because that was all the mechanics could read. Everything since — extra columns, zigzag paths, ways instead of lines, cascading grids — is a way of asking more questions of the same random draw.

What the return figure is

The number printed on every game is a long-run average: what the game returns across millions of rounds, not what it returns to you tonight. Over a hundred rounds the spread around it is enormous; over a hundred thousand it is not.

Reading a reward table

Rewards are quoted as multiples of your stake. A ×300 line does not mean the game is generous, it means that line is rare. The frequency and the size always move against each other — that is what keeps the return figure fixed.

The thing worth remembering

No grid game has a memory. A column that has not shown its top glyph in two hundred rounds is exactly as likely to show it next round as it was on the first. Every system built on the opposite belief is built on sand.