That’s right. The first step is admitting you have a problem. We all do, when it comes to the Buffalo slot. Why is that? As much as we may like other slot machines, the Buffalo calls to us, almost like that slot machine in the old Twilight Zone episode that calls out the hapless hero’s name (and at one point, follows him up to his hotel room). Très creepy.

Buffalo slots are classic games – a part of slot history. The game play is relatively simple. There is an all-ways system, free spins and wilds which can get multipliers. What is different about this game is that the balance is just right. Buffalo is the key game in that range and it brings players the chance to cover an outstanding 1,024 different winning combinations. Aristocrat has extended the reels to four rows, just like on their fifty line games like 50 Dragons and 50 Lions, but the difference here is any adjacent symbols are likely to pay out a prize, just like on the.

The Buffalo slot machine (in all its manifestations) has none of that creepiness. The sound effects are benign, even friendly. Buffalo seems like such a good-natured machine. And it’s generous, too. So what if the wins tend to be less than huge?

Ask anyone who’s shoveled a hundred bucks or more into a “cold” slot machine, and they’ll tell you that small-but-frequent wins are easily preferable to huge-but-rare wins. Well, they’re both nice, but in our heart of hearts, we slot players know that the pay tables eventually favor the house.

Somehow, the Buffalo slot manages to convince us we’re ahead of the game (or drawing closer to it), even when we’re clearly not. How does Aristocrat achieve this?

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It’s a clever and skillful combination of those frequent small wins with bonuses inside bonuses, free spins, re-triggers, multipliers that multiply other multipliers, and at the heart of it all, Aristocrat’s own invention, Reel Power.

Reel Power (and its own spin-offs, Xtra Reel Power and Super Reel Power) is a departure from the time-tested single-line slot machine that required symbols to line up along a horizontal line etched into the glass face of the machine.

Oh, there were some innovations, such as three-line and five-line machines, but these all required a bet placed on each line to activate it as a winning option.

Other manufacturers built three-line and even five-line machines, all of which required an escalating coin-in to qualify for the full number of win-lines.

Enter Aristocrat. In the 1990s, Aristocrat developed what it called Reel Power, which did away with the “lines” concept and made the entire face (the five mechanical reels were now mere digital images on a video screen by this time) a winning field.

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Instead of five pay lines (three horizontal lines for the three rows of symbols, along with the two diagonal lines), Aristocrat made a lineless screen, and five matching symbols appearing in any of the three horizontal rows resulted in a win.

Not to go all mathematical on you, but with five reels, each presenting three symbols, this gave the slot player 243 ways he or she could win.

Naturally, with this arrangement, wins would occur much more frequently, and since slot players aren’t paying for those machines — casinos are — Aristocrat had to downsize the wins.

Along with more frequent wins, Aristocrat tossed in bonus rounds, nested multipliers, and wild cards that double as win-multipliers, and you have a winning combination.

By the way, Xtra Reel Power is the addition of a fourth horizontal row of symbols to the game, which gives the player 1024 ways to win, and Super Reel Power is the addition of a fifth horizontal row of symbols (giving the player over 3000 paths to glory).

Me, I’m waiting for Aristocrat to develop Super-Duper Reel Power, in which I win without leaving the house and they just mail me a check.

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But we were talking about Aristocrat, the American success story from Australia.

It took some time for the Buffalo to catch on, particularly in “destination” cities like Las Vegas and Reno.

Vegas and Reno (and even Atlantic City) weren’t the only places with casinos, as it happens. Tribal casinos were springing up in the oddest places, and — more often than not — they catered to locals much more than the “destination” casinos did.

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Aristocrat put Buffalo slots in these tribal casinos, and — wouldn’t you know it? The locals liked the reality of many small wins to the fantasy of the big jackpot. They adored the cry of “Buffalooooo!” whenever even the smallest win took place. And they were enamored with the idea of “lineless” slots, where even the minimum bet could reap real rewards.