Published 2026-09-22
REELS ships seven slot machines, and each one rewrites a different rule of the draw. Here are all seven with the real numbers printed on their cards, why the four original ones shipped with the exact values they were born with on 12 August 2026, and the one place where a machine was caught making the game lie to the player.
REELS is a roguelite built on a slot machine you take down into a pit. The machine spins on its own, three symbols at a time, and what comes up is what you get to fight with. So the machine is not a backdrop. It is the weapon.
Which raises the question every roguelite eventually has to answer: what does the second weapon do?
The answer in the source file is one sentence, and it is a promise rather than a feature list: each machine rewrites the rules of the draw. Not the numbers of the draw. The rules. There are seven of them, four earned and three found, and this is what each one is allowed to touch.
The machine model is deliberately tiny. Six fields, and no machine may reach past them:
That is the entire vocabulary. A machine cannot give you more health, cannot change a charm, cannot touch the toll clock. Everything a machine does, it does by making the draw itself behave differently, and the player can see all of it on one card before choosing.
The baseline numbers it bends are the ones the whole game is built on. A spin is 3 seconds. The symbols come up star 42 percent, diamond 27, skull 31. The machine jams on 8 percent of spins. A toll gives you 60 seconds in adventure mode.
The four earned machines arrived in one commit on 12 August 2026, the one that added the workshop, the editions and the rerolls. I checked the diff this morning against what ships today. The numbers have not moved since. Not one value, in six weeks of tuning that changed damage, radii, charm counts and half the palette. The only edit the block ever received was cosmetic: an em dash in the Fiévreuse description was replaced with a comma later the same day, in a commit whose message ends with "no more em dashes."
L'Honnête. 3 second spin, 8 percent blanks, weights 42·27·31. It does not cheat for you or against you. Its description in the file calls it "the machine of the mockup", which is exactly what it is: the reference against which the other six are deviations. The daily challenge is locked to it, so that everyone plays the same machine on the same seed.
La Rouillée. 3.6 second spin, and every symbol counts one notch higher. A single is a pair, a pair is a triple, capped at three. Unlocked at toll 06. This is the one machine that changes what a result means rather than how often it appears, and it is worth being precise about what that is worth: a triple star fires 12 shots at 24 damage instead of a pair's 8 shots at 18, and a triple diamond is a 185 pixel wave at 40 damage instead of 130 at 25. La Rouillée buys you the top of every payout table and charges 0.6 seconds per spin for it. Over a 60 second toll that is roughly three fewer spins.
La Fiévreuse. 2.2 second spin, weights flattened to 34·33·33, and blanks multiplied by 1.8, so 14 percent of spins give you nothing. Unlocked at 15 jackpots. The flattening is the real change and it is harsher than it looks. On L'Honnête you always have a refuge symbol, the one that comes up 42 percent of the time and that you can plan around. La Fiévreuse takes it away. Its own description says it: you do not build on this machine, you surf it.
La Voleuse. Standard 3 second spin, but luck accrues twice as fast and the gauge leaks 2 percent per second, continuously, unless a jackpot is already armed. Unlocked at 800 kills. This is the only machine that makes the passage of time cost you something other than clock. Luck on La Voleuse is not a resource you save, it is a resource you spend before it evaporates.
Three more arrived on 14 August, in the commit that brought the campaign seasons and the twenty secrets. They are not on a progress track. They drop out of a secret, and the comment above them states the constraint their existence had to satisfy:
> a machine that only changed its name would not deserve to be loot.
So each one had to bend a rule the first four had not bent, or bend two of them against each other.
La Bancale. 3.9 second spin, the slowest in the game, jams 19 percent of the time, and counts every symbol one notch higher like La Rouillée. It is the pair of numbers nobody would have designed as a reward if rewards had to be strictly better. You get the best payout table in the game attached to the worst spin economics, and the file calls it the poor player's bet.
La Muette. 3.2 second spin, and it never jams. Not rarely. Never, 0 percent, the only machine in the game where every single spin produces three symbols. In exchange its weights are flattened like La Fiévreuse's, so there is no refuge. Perfect reliability, zero preference.
La Détraquée. 1.9 second spin, about twice as fast as everything else, 11 percent blanks, luck at 2.5 times the normal rate leaking 3.5 percent per second. It is the fastest and the most volatile object in the game at the same time.
There is a floor underneath all of this. Spin interval is clamped at 1.4 seconds, because below that attacks overlap and the screen stops being readable. La Détraquée at 1.9 sits close to it, and no stack of machine plus workshop plus charms plus pact can push past it.
Every machine in the selection screen shows a stat block, and the function that builds it is titled, in the source, "what the machine does to the rules, in four comparable numbers." The lines are the real labels, in French, in the shipped build: tour in seconds, tours vides as a percentage, poids as 42·27·31 or 34·33·33 in star, diamond, skull order, then combinaisons as plus one notch, chance as a multiplier and fuite as a percent per second, each appearing only when the machine actually has one.
So the blank rate on the card is not a word like "often". It is 8, 8, 14, 8, 19, 0 and 11 percent, computed from the same multiplier the engine uses. If those two ever disagreed, the card would be wrong, which is the whole reason it is derived rather than typed.
The locked machines show something more unusual: the condition and your current position in it. Not "reach toll 06" but "toll 06, you are at 05", which is the example written into the source. The jackpot and kill counters read the same way, with your own running total after the target. A locked door that tells you how far along the corridor you are is a different object from a locked door.
The two secret machines that sit on the secret board get a line I like more than any other in that screen. It does not tell you what the secret is. It tells you which square to go look at: "a secret, square 01". The number is stable, so the player has a thread to pull rather than a spoiler or a shrug.
REELS is free to try and one purchase unlocks everything permanently. The machines sit exactly on that line, and the code comment explaining where they sit is blunt about why:
The trial plays L'Honnête and looks at the other six. Not three of seven. The comment reasons that the machine rack is an entire replayability system, and handing over three of them would be giving away the variety before the purchase.
But look at what the progress line does under the trial. It does not say "15 jackpots" to a player who could not play La Fiévreuse even after earning them. It says "the full game". The source calls saying otherwise a false trail, and that is the correct name for it: a counter that fills up toward a door that will not open is worse than a closed door, because it spends the player's attention on a goal that is not the real one.
One number in that file did move, and it is not a machine's.
Charms bias the machine. Each charm you carry of a given symbol adds 4 percent to that symbol's weight, and the game says so on screen. That is the specialisation loop: the deeper you commit to a family, the more the machine serves it.
The star weight had a cap at 0.55. With a base of 0.42, a player hit that ceiling on their fourth star charm, and every star charm after it did nothing at all. The rule printed in the game said plus 4 percent per charm. From the fourth charm on, the rule was false.
The cap is now 0.70. The comment recording the change says the old value made the displayed rule lie, and gives the new intent in one line: a full star build should feel every charm, and the machine should still keep 30 percent of its reels non star. It leans, it does not submit.
That is the same principle as the stat card and the progress line, applied to arithmetic instead of typography. The game is allowed to be hard, random, and to jam 19 percent of the time if you picked the machine that does that. It is not allowed to print a number that is not true.
REELS is on the App Store, free to try, one purchase unlocks everything: apps.apple.com/app/id6801441632