Place your bets — Stern’s 2001 High Roller Casino turns a whole gaming floor into a playfield, and it’s stuffed with the kind of gambling toys that make a machine sing. There’s a slot machine with a dot-matrix display for its spinning reels and a moving handle, plus a roulette wheel the ball can enter from two directions, with a hidden magnet beneath that stops your loop shot cold. Keith Johnson and Jon Norris designed it, John Youssi and Kevin O’Connor dressed it in Vegas neon, and an elevating ramp with three positions fronts that slot machine while a physical lock holds three balls.
The smart gambler plays the odds carefully. Multiball lives at the slot machine, so keep feeding it — but mind the return, which can be a handful. There’s genuine strategy in the Roll ‘n Win awards: experienced players know to decline Slot Machine Multiball the first time it’s offered, because later multiballs are tougher to qualify and you don’t want to burn the easy one early. Super Loops makes a worthwhile stack with multiball, since either loop will then pay both lit jackpots, and racking up Cheat Games from repeated ramps turns your casino-game losses into guaranteed wins — a house edge in your favor for once.
High Roller Casino is unapologetic, glitzy fun, a machine that treats the playfield like the Strip after dark. It rewards the player who learns when to gamble and when to hold, exactly like the games it celebrates. Spin the slots, ride the loops, and bank those Cheat Games for when the table turns cold. In this casino, the disciplined player is the one who walks away ahead.