Found a Life's a Beach m/c in a Spoons and started to play. One of the first few spins produced a 4 on the middle reel with nothing either side of it, so I expected the Double Bonus. As you would. But no, the bonus only went up on position 4 on the right-hand column - the left column had stopped at position 2. Strange, I hmmm'd.
Played on and quickly realised that the whole flexi on reel 1 must be attached in the wrong place, so I grabbed a pen and worked out the reel band, wasted a quid or two working out where the machine thought it was landing and deduced that it was 4 fruits 'behind' on the reel. So where it was spinning in a fruit with no number, it was adding 2 positions to the left trail. But it got stranger...
A bonus eventually puts me up into the feature board, where I note that the blue 7s are 4 nudges away. The gambles up to 4 nudges all won, but it didn't say 4 Nudges = 10.00 like it usually would. Manually nudged them onto the winline and it recognised it as a £10 win. Soon became apparent (after some more trial and error) that the machine was correctly identifying fruits in 3-of-a-kind reel position on the feature, and awarding the prize when 3-of-a-kind were lined up on the winline, but it was lost with regard to what your nudges were worth before you'd manually nudged them down.
All very head-scratchingly bemusing but it meant that there were effectively infrequent 'free-wins' in the offing (well, high value wins it can't have been planning on offering), so clawed together a cheap bank of roughly £85 before tip-toeing away.
But I'm at a loss as to why it would recognise the 3-of-a-kind wins when they nudged down, yet it played to a different reel position in reel play. Any ideas?
