Make no mistake here; there can be no doubt that whilst there are examples of better uses for Wizard’s great emulator, I can categorically state that these are very few and far between. Back in the long, hot 1989 Summer of Love, this very machine conquered the clubs like some giant colossus – it was everywhere. It was one of those very few club machines that you’d find yourself actively seeking out and be mighty chagrined in the event of it having been re-sited and some other awful ‘Crest like Club Action Cash in its place. If Club Adders and Ladders is the motorcycling equivalent of a knackered old Yamaha RD400 with crap brakes, Club Blackjack is a Suzook RG500… fast, effective, truly hardcore even by today’s standards - pointy, dangerous, exciting, compelling. A genuine, true classic.
Ask anyone who has even so much as slotted a solitary ten pence into a fruit machine or loaded up a layout or two to name their all time clubbers. Tastes vary, naturally – I am famously an absolute devotee of BFM Sys85, Scorp 1 and Scorp 2 clubbers, the likes of Club SixFive Special, Grandslam, Club Cash Attraction and any number of other amazing gambling machines.
These BFM designs were not great simply because they had ‘tricks’ to be exploited and could be emptied (although we most of us now know, with the benefit of FME hindsight, that in fact many could). No, they were great because they could hold a player’s interest and be exciting, even when ‘on the take’… there was forever and always the chance of a jackpot/big win, feature or gamble off every credit, where even the lows were adrenaline-soaked and there was always the machine’s compensator on hand to mitigate the really heavy losses. Critically, these BFM machines could never be mistaken for AWPs.
However, there can be no doubt whatsoever that Club Blackjack would get a very frequent mention also amongst such a demographic – even among our younger Sceners - and this from a manufacturer hardly renown for its great clubbers!
The question for us here, of course, is just what is it that defines this particular machine as an all-time club classic, where so many of its other Barcrest brethren, superficially similar in some cases – fail?
It is a complex question that’s hard to answer, but as ever I shall try to shed some light, sharing with you my own half-arsed theories in this matter. The machine itself is a fairly conventional 4-reeler with progressive feature trail, cashpot and uncapped, shit-or-bbust gamble. Straight away then, a key characteristic of a great clubber is immediately obvious – it’s the latter uncapped, ‘risk all’ gamble.
It’s such a simple, universally successful concept; all the great clubbers have it. You’d suppose, then, that FM manufacturers like Barcrest would cotton onto it as a ubiquitous machine characteristic - as inherent a part of a club machine as holds, nudges and cashpot. Yet how many Barcrest clubbers do not have this, foisting small wins onto a player as so many do, or even where they do supposedly have it – Club Red Hot Roll and Club Adders and Ladders again springing to mind – it’s rigged and useless?
Even back in the day, where I was impoverished and would never risk gambling out a prize all the way to near JP prizes (much to my detriment on this machine at least, as it turns out), I always knew that one of those single and double cherry wins would eventually come up trumps on the big x12 gamble for an easy fiver to recycle. Thus those ubiquitous Barcest open play cherry wins were actually a welcome sight on this particular machine, there effectively being a de facto ‘exchange path’ for them that didn’t involve having to take tiny, forced wins and in so doing, adding a crucial, much needed element of excitement. The WWC First Law of Good Club Machines – an ‘out’ for small wins - is thus obeyed, albeit in an oblique fashion. (As it turns out I should’ve pressed on of course, as this machine simply loved to ‘save’ for a huge near-JP gamble payout, just like Solid Silver, but much more spectacularly so).
The machine also sports a REAL Cashpot, thus obeying the WWC Second Law. By ‘real’, I mean an attainable sub-jackpot but substantial prize, rather than simply a jackpot by any other name, paid in lieu of the real thing, supposedly keeping players interested in the meantime, though I doubt anyone is really fooled. Club Fairground is a prime example of this syndrome; in this case the Cashpot is the jackpot.
The CP is won either by spinning in three triple bars (never seen this and there’s literally no chance of getting this off the lowly nudges feature) or gambling via the Hi-Lo feature ladder, which did go, albeit you really had to have the stomach for it, which is how it should be of course. No ‘rolling over’ and throwing the thing at you, unlike contemporary JPMs that were notorious for this; fortune really did favour the brave with Club Blackjack, just as for the very best BFM clubbers. No coincidence, I’d say.
The value of the CP was usually around one-third to half the top prize, so whilst it was well worth having, it did not substitute for the machine’s jackpot. (Ironically, like most Barcrests, the actual full jackpot was very, very rare. However, the de facto jackpot was obtainable off the uncapped gamble – usually off tiny cherry wins – as aforestated).
This brings us neatly to the focal point of the whole game – the feature ladder and its awesome hi-lo gamble. I still get sweaty palms playing the emulated game for Heaven’s sake, when there’s no actual money involved and it has been some 20 years plus since I’ve seen, less still played one of these things for real. I could say much about this aspect of the machine but all one really needs to know is this: the feature hi-lo gamble is a compelling, hard-as-nails, unpredictable and unforgiving bitch, but you just had to come back for more and by God, when it did all work for you, when you did get away with gambling on one shit number after the next to achieve a really high feature such as Super Blackjack, your heart thudding in your ears, almost unable to look at that card reel along the way – it was pure, unalloyed clubber heaven!
Let’s take a step back at this point. The feature entry is, of course, your bog standard ‘word fill’ affair (except the ‘word’ was a fan of cards), with numbers on fruits and an ability to feature hold. There are no open play nudges unfortunately (albeit to be fair, not at all unusual for machines of this vintage), so it was a case of holding numbers in open play, hoping for the best. Quite a nice touch was the ‘Card Link’ subfeature – this being a randomly given, three-shot link up type affair to get you into the main feature.
Once you’re in, you always start at the bottom of the ladder, the card reel respins (often to a much worse number lol) and off you go… enhanced ‘Super Start’ feature entry only came about on the second incarnation of this machine (itself another classic, though not quite in the same league for me).
As I mentioned previously, the feature hi-lo gamble is a bastard. It’ll think nothing of binning you off even from good numbers/cards, and it just loves to chuck awful, middling cards at you. The thing is though, this feels like a real hi-lo gamble, just as if you were doing it with a pack of cards – there isn’t that utterly contrived feeling that you get with so many other machines, that’s what makes it great. I mean, how many machines do you play (AWPs in particular), where you get something like a 2 (go higher), 12 (go lower), 3 (go higher), 8 …? You think to yourself, ‘Oh right, this is where I get off then, it’s collect, feature exchange or a guaranteed lose, whichever way I go, if I push on at this point’. That just sucks, doesn’t it? Club Blackjack isn’t like that, at least not much. Sure, no doubt its CP and JP have to be protected to an extent, but to get that far in the first place you’re doing well and if you were anything like me, you’d be hitting COLLECT for one of those top features.
In terms of the features themselves, there isn’t anything worth collecting before Blackjack and I doubt very much that anyone did so. In the case of Blackjack, the Five Card Trick bonus was a lovely touch, meaning than a tenner was occasionally given, even off this lowly feature – not bad for a 10p play variant. (Sure, it was all contrived bollocks in a way; there was precious little skill involved and you got what you were given – so it that meant an 19 with less than five cards, you took your £3 and moved on).
Super nudges are a bit rubbish – always an initial respin, so no point in thinking about reel set ups prior to feature entry. Four plums for £3 are usually offered at some point in the ‘respin or collect’ running order, very occasionally a fiver but you’ll crash and burn most of the time if you hold out for this. (There is no backstop 1 nudge consolation prize either; you can completely run out of nudges and shit out with absolutely nowt). I suspect it would’ve been better to have had this as a higher feature, but you can’t have everything.
Superwin is kind of similar, it’s a choose a win basically, without bothering with nudges. Up to a fiver is occasionally offered.
A big criticism at this point has to be the lack of a gamble option for any wins obtained off the feature – even conventional reel wins from either nudges or Superwin – which is a bit crap. None of the features repeats either, but I guess something has got to give here. You can’t have an awesome, progressive cash gamble, frequent feature entry, exciting hi-lo feature climb, good mid-ranking features, Cashpot and repeating features.
Note Climb is exactly like the Action Cash climber on Club Action Cash, despite it being a middling feature only – you get your first note lit and three chances to progressively light the next, up the note ladder. Exciting stuff then, big wins being theoretically possible, even if in reality you never got further than the third or fourth note and there was no gamble available.
The £10 cash prize is next up in the running order and the last of the frequently attainable feature ladder positions (on the 20p stake variant that I used to play, this was £20 of course, and I’d usually collect). After that, we have Super Blackjack (an excellent Pontoon feature which enables high cards to be taken as low values so as to easily net the Five Card Trick bonus in addition to the quadrupled main prize values) and Notation. This is a note link feature which is always reasonable and likes to occasionally give handsome returns, though I prefer SBJ, personally.
Finally, there are the £25, Cashpot and Jackpot positions, which are obviously self explanatory. I never had anything like the cahoneys required to get within a sniff of these, but reading Tommy C’s earlier comments, he did! Fair do’s; it seems that the machine was prepared to give the Cashpot, usually at £20 increments – which is a nice finishing touch to an epic machine.
Day of Judgement
Playing Tommy C’s fantastic layout, I find that my affection for this great machine remains undimmed, unlike so many other FME disappointments where rose tinted specs have played their part. I’ve had some stonking sub-JP gambled wins and a great run for my money on the higher features, SBJ and Notation in particular. Quite simply, it’s just a great old machine.
WWC Saint or Sinner? You surely don’t need to ask – Barcrest’s finest ever clubber, bar none.
WWC SAS Rating: 9/10, Archangel
View the full article
