Every rule, all three games

01 / Midway Lights

Five-reel rules

Five reels turn independently. Each reel is the same strip of twenty positions, and three positions from each land in the window, giving you a grid five columns wide and three rows deep.

The five paylines

• Line 1 — straight across the middle row.
• Line 2 — straight across the top row.
• Line 3 — straight across the bottom row.
• Line 4 — top, middle, bottom, middle, top: a V.
• Line 5 — bottom, middle, top, middle, bottom: the same V flipped.

All five are always active, so your stake per line is multiplied by five to get the cost of a spin. A win must start on reel one and run left to right without a gap.

Symbol values, per line staked

Big Wheel values multiply your total stake rather than the line stake, and they count from anywhere on the grid. Everything else pays along a line. Play it on the Midway Lights screen.

02 / Steam Vent Solitaire

Klondike rules, draw three

Twenty-eight cards go into seven columns, one to seven cards each, with only the last card of every column face up. The remaining twenty-four sit in the draw pile.

• Columns build downward in alternating colours: a black nine takes a red eight.
• A run that already follows that pattern moves as one block.
• Empty columns accept a king, or a run led by a king. Nothing else.
• Vents build upward in one suit, ace first. The first ace to arrive claims an empty vent.
• Cards in a vent are final — they cannot come back down.
• The draw pile turns three cards at a time. Only the top card plays. When it is empty, turning it again recycles the waste, as many times as you like.
• A face-down card flips as soon as it is uncovered.

What it pays

Your stake is charged when the cards are dealt. Every card that reaches a vent pays back a tenth of the stake immediately, and finishing all four suits adds a bonus equal to the stake. A completed 100-coin layout therefore returns 620 coins, and an unfinished one still returns 10 coins for every card you managed to place.

There is no undo, which is why the payouts can be paid as you go. Play it on the Steam Vent Solitaire screen.

03 / Driftwood Hi-Lo

Higher-or-lower rules

One 52-card deck, aces high, suits ignored. Your stake becomes a run, and every correct call multiplies the run by the figure shown on the button you pressed.

• A higher card on a "higher" call, or a lower card on a "lower" call, is correct.
• The same rank is a push: the run is untouched and the new card becomes your reference.
• A wrong call ends the round and the run is lost.
• Banking moves the run into your coin balance and ends the round.
• The deck is not reset between calls. When fewer than ten cards remain, a fresh 52-card deck is shuffled in.

How the multiplier is worked out

Take the cards still in the deck. Count how many are higher than the card showing and how many are lower; ignore the ones that match, because those push. If h cards are higher and l are lower, the chance of a correct "higher" call is h ÷ (h + l).

The multiplier is 0.98 divided by that probability, rounded down to two decimal places, with a floor of 1.02. So a call that is right half the time pays 1.96, and one that is right a quarter of the time pays 3.92. The two per cent shortfall is the house edge, and it is identical on every call. Play it on the Driftwood Hi-Lo screen.