Joker - Flame Game

BURN WHAT YOU KNOW IS COMING

Most fruit-machine games ask you to press one button and hope. This one does the opposite. Every symbol that can land in front of you is printed before the match starts - and shown to you, in order, on the screen. The only thing that moves your score is which cells you choose to burn.

THE SLATE AND THE QUEUE
A round opens on a 3x3 slate of fruit-machine symbols and a fully printed FIRE QUEUE: the exact, ordered list of what will refill any cell you burn. Left to right, top to bottom, no surprises. Mark the cells you want gone, press BURN, and the queue delivers exactly what it promised. Nothing is rolled behind your back. Nothing is decided while you look away.

EMBERS ARE THE REAL DECISION
Burning costs one ember per cell, and your embers have to last the WHOLE match - 18 to start, +3 at the top of every round after the first. That is 39 embers against the 72 it would take to burn everything in all eight rounds. Round 8 scores double. So the ember you spend in round 2 is the ember you will not have when the doubled round arrives, and the player who reads the queue two rounds ahead beats the player who only reacts.

WHAT A ROUND FEELS LIKE
Fifteen seconds on the clock. You read the queue, mark two cells, burn, and watch the holes refill in reading order - and now there is a line that was not there before. Burn again, or COLLECT and bank the seconds you saved? Every ember you did not spend lifts your confidence multiplier up to x2.00, and every second left on the timer pays. Three rows and two diagonals score. Columns never do, so almost every cell on the slate is carrying two lines at once.

NINE OF A KIND
Fill the slate with a single symbol and the Joker's Wheel opens: x2 through x10, already spinning at a printed speed. You tap to stop it. Where it lands is a pure function of when you tapped - the wheel draws no random number at all, in any match, for any player.

WHAT IS IN THE GAME
- 8 rounds of 15 seconds; a full match runs about two and a half minutes
- A 3x3 slate with 5 paylines: three rows and two diagonals
- Nine symbols paying 40 to 800, from the blue X up to the Joker
- The Joker is wild and pays the substituted symbol x1.5
- A match-long ember pool instead of a per-round allowance
- Round 8 counts double, and unspent embers pay +50 each at the end
- The Joker's Wheel, x2 to x10, stopped by your finger and nothing e