DJ Dog on screen: three columns, ten positions, ten fixed lines

What you are actually looking at

The playing area is the middle third of the screen, framed by two red pillars. Everything outside them — the dog at his decks on the left, the shuttered street on the right, the speakers at the foot of the frame — is scenery. No symbol ever lands there, nothing in it changes a result, and none of it is a control.

That matters more on a small game than on a large one. When a grid has five columns the grid dominates the screen and there is no doubt where to look. Here the grid takes up less than half the width, and the rest of the picture is busy and lit and moving. The first useful thing to learn about this screen is which part of it is the game.

The second is that the grid is not square. It is often described as if it were, and it is not.

How the grid is actually shaped

Three columns, holding 3, 4 and 3 symbols from left to right. That is 10 positions, not nine and not twelve. The studio writes it as a 3-4-3 row slot on 3 reels, a catalogue entry lists the layout as 3-4-3, and an operator lobby describes it in the same words. You can also simply count them in the picture above.

This is worth being firm about because at least one widely read account of this game states a flat three-by-three grid, and a reader who believes that will be confused the first time a symbol lands in a fourth row. Where a number can be checked against the game itself, the game wins.

Paylines explained: ten of them, and none of them switches off

Ten fixed lines run across those ten positions. Fixed means exactly what it says: there is no control anywhere on this screen for turning lines on or off, so the familiar question of how many lines to play has no answer here because it is not a question the game asks. You set one figure — the total for the round — and all ten lines are live for it.

With only three columns, a line is three symbols and a win is a whole line. There is no partial match, no two-of-a-kind on a five-column grid, nothing to read halfway. Combinations run left to right from the leftmost column, so the leftmost column has to be part of any line win.

The lines are numbered down the two pillars that flank the reels, which is where a five-column game would put nothing at all. It is the one piece of interface this game puts outside the grid, and it is easy to mistake for decoration.

What the eight-spin round does to the picture

The feature is called Lucky Spins. It runs for 8 spins and it is not triggered by anything you do or by any combination you can see coming — it simply arrives on a base round, and the round it arrives on is the start of it.

What it does to the screen is unusually drastic for a feature. The ordinary symbols stop appearing altogether; only gold records and empty positions land. A counter lights up above the decks reading how far through the eight you are. The grid, the ten lines and the stake all stay exactly as they were, which is why this page treats the feature as a state of the screen rather than as a separate game.

Where the numbers live

Everything you can adjust sits in one strip along the bottom edge: a menu at the far left, the stake with a minus and a plus either side of it, a message panel in the middle carrying two figures, and the control that spins at the far right. Below that strip runs a thinner row of switches — sound, a windowed-or-not toggle, a way out, a session reference and a clock.

The clock is the one piece of that row worth noticing on purpose. A game screen is otherwise a room with no windows: nothing in the lighting, the music or the pace tells you how long you have been there.

What is settled here, and the two figures that are not

Everything above is settled. The grid, the ten lines, the eight spins and the platform list come from the studio’s own specification and can be checked against the running game. They are the reason this site is about the shape of the screen rather than about percentages.

Two numbers are not settled, and both are the numbers people usually come looking for. The return is the first. The studio does not publish one for this game — its specification lists game type, swing and platforms and nothing else — and the pages this site was rewritten from named none either. Outside pages print 95%, three of them independently, and so does at least one operator lobby. One of those pages phrases it as the studio having rated it so; that is the page talking about the studio, not the studio talking. The figure is theirs, it is worth knowing, and it is not this game’s published specification.

The maximum is the second, and it is worse. Three readings circulate: a reading of the game’s own rules panel gives a cap of 5,000x on the feature; a catalogue lists a top win of 10,000x; a British review states 2,500x in its verdict while its own feature section states the first of the three. The studio publishes no maximum either, so there is nothing above them.

Which leaves one honest instruction for both: the information panel behind the menu, in the copy you are signed in to, is the only place either number is written down by something that knows your build. Everything else — this page included — is reporting what other people wrote.

Who built it, and why two names turn up

Greentube built it. Novomatic is the group Greentube belongs to, and the group’s mark is printed along the bottom edge of the client itself, which is why part of the pages about this title file it under one name and part under the other.

Neither is wrong and there is no argument here: one owns the other. It is worth saying plainly because an apparent disagreement about who made a game is the kind of thing that makes a reader distrust everything else on a page, and in this case there is nothing to distrust.