Published 2026-09-07
The reels in REELS drop on a clock and no button spins them again. The draft between floors can be rerolled, for a price that doubles. Here is why the two rules are opposite, and the reward I got wrong twice in August.
Every roguelite has to decide how much of its randomness the player is allowed to refuse. Slay the Spire lets you skip a card. Brotato sells you a new shop. Balatro sells you a new hand of Jokers. REELS is a slot machine, so the question is sharper than usual: can you spin again?
The answer shipped as two rules that point in opposite directions. The spin can never be rerolled, by anyone, for any price. The draft can always be rerolled, and the price doubles every time. This is about why, and about the three weeks in August 2026 when I got the pricing of the second one wrong twice.
There is no spin button in REELS. The reels drop on their own while you move through the pit: every 3 seconds on the default machine, and anywhere from 1.9 to 3.9 seconds across the seven machines, minus whatever you have stacked on top. There is a hard floor of 1.4 seconds, because below that the weapons overlap and the screen stops being readable.
You can shorten the interval. You cannot say no to a result. A blank window is a blank window, and the toll clock keeps running while you look at it.
That is the rule that makes the money-free slot machine work at all. A slot machine you can respin at will is not a slot machine, it is a menu. The whole point of building combat on top of a spin is that the spin is the thing that happens to you, and your build is how you answer it. The moment a player can refuse a result, every decision in the draft gets weaker, because the reels stop mattering.
Three items in the game bend this without breaking it, and it matters that none of them is a button. A rare charm called The Reread lets one blank reel in two spin again, once per turn at most. The limit is deliberate: with an unlimited Reread, blanks would stop existing, and the empty-turn gauge that fills up on blanks and eventually arms a jackpot would never fill. Another rare charm, Echo, makes one turn in four fire again almost at once. And one of the hammers, the rewirings the game offers at floors 3, 6 and 9, replays one spin in five with the same window. All three make the machine spin more. None of them lets you choose when.
Between two floors, the game deals you charm cards. That is where the roguelite lives, and that is where I let the player push back.
Rerolling the draft arrived on 12 August 2026, borrowed straight from CloverPit. Until then, souls you reaped beyond the toll's quota simply vanished when the floor ended. Now they become surplus, and surplus buys rerolls: 40 souls for the first, doubling for each one after it within the same draft, reset at the next floor. The surplus itself is never kept. You spend it on new cards or you lose it. Farming past the quota became a decision, which is what a roguelite wants from every number.
Two days later the level-up offer got the same grammar. When you gain a level mid-floor, the game shows you a single upgrade. You can take it or pay 20 souls out of the current toll's count for a different one, doubling each time, reset at the next level. Paying with the souls you are supposed to be collecting for the toll is the cost. It is not a token from a separate wallet, it is the floor's own oxygen.
On 16 August an audit of every button in the game found the ugliest version of this. The reroll charged first and looked at the shelf second. When nothing else was left to offer, it took your souls, or your free reroll and doubled the next price, then quietly dealt the same card back. You paid, the screen did not move, nothing told you why. The order is reversed now, and the button switches off when the shelf is empty. A reroll with nothing behind it is not sold.
The part I want to be honest about is the free reroll, because I wrote a rule, wrote a paragraph in the code defending it, and then wrote a longer paragraph above that one explaining why it was backwards.
Finishing a floor without taking a single hit is the hardest way to play REELS. Until mid-August it earned you nothing on the spot, only a lifetime counter nobody looks at. On 16 August I made a clean floor pay a bonus of 25 percent of the souls you had collected that floor, with a floor of five. I chose a percentage over a flat amount, and the comment in the code said why: a flat reward would evaporate at floor 12, where the feat is hardest.
Two days later I replaced it with one free reroll, for three reasons that only appeared once I wrote the numbers down.
First, the percentage was already a reroll in disguise. In adventure mode the bonus landed before the surplus was calculated, and surplus does exactly one thing: it buys rerolls. So I was rewarding a clean floor with souls that turned into rerolls, through a conversion the player had to do in their head.
Second, in endless mode it bought nothing at all. Endless zeroes the surplus by design, because there the soul is a score, not a currency. The bonus therefore purchased nothing, and it moved you closer to the next threshold, which means harder waves, sooner. A punishment dressed as a reward, in the mode where you chain the most floors.
Third, my defence of the percentage was inverted. At the reroll prices in the game, 25 percent of a floor's souls is worth roughly a quarter of a reroll on floor 2 and about a reroll and a half on floor 12. So the percentage paid the least early in the run, exactly when you have no build yet and staying clean is hardest. A single free reroll gains value on its own as the run deepens and the pool of charms gets more specific.
I also considered a free upgrade rank instead of a reroll and turned it down. Power snowballs: more power makes clean floors easier, which earns more power. A reroll rewards skill with choice, and choice cannot run away with itself.
The free rerolls live in a single stock. Two things fill it: a workshop upgrade bought with tokens between runs, called The house token, 6,000 tokens for the first rank and three ranks at most, and the clean floor. Two things spend it: the level-up offer and the charm draft. One number to learn, for one idea.
I had started writing a second counter for the clean floor bonus before finding that the first one already existed for the workshop. That is a small embarrassment worth recording, because the fix was better than either counter: a free reroll is consumed before any souls, and it never doubles the price of the rerolls you pay for afterwards. Otherwise the reward would have been paying for itself.
The stock lives with the run, not the floor. The comment in the code says it in one line: three free rerolls per floor would remove the randomness instead of softening it. A free reroll earned on floor 3 can be kept for floor 7, when the pool is deeper and you are hunting a specific card.
One last detail, because it nearly repeated the mistake I had just fixed. The reroll button sat on the shop counter, and the counter is hidden in endless mode. So the free reroll I had just introduced to make the clean-floor reward spendable everywhere would have been unspendable in endless, by a different route. Putting the button at the bottom of the screen was not enough, the cards fill the view and a screenshot proved it. In endless the button now sits above the cards.
The spin is the weather. The draft is the umbrella. You cannot change the weather, and I will not sell you a button that pretends you can. You can spend what you reaped on a better umbrella, and the price of the second one is set so that you feel it.
REELS is on the App Store, with a trial that runs to floor 5 and contains all of this arithmetic, then one purchase that unlocks everything for good. No ads, no lives, no continues, and no spin button. Get REELS.