Rainbow Riches, reviewed

Museum collections keep two kinds of specimen: the newly described, and the ones that explain where everything else came from. Rainbow Riches is the second kind. It began life as a Barcrest game in the pub-and-arcade era of the mid-2000s, crossed to the online catalogue, and the brand has since passed through Scientific Games into Light & Wonder’s stable — three corporate hosts, one leprechaun, no visible ageing. As of this writing it still sits in the classics row of nearly every GB-licensed lobby, which for a design of this vintage is less a ranking than a fossil record.

The question a taxonomist has to answer is not whether it is old. It is why the species has not gone extinct.

The specimen, on paper

Three species in one cabinet

Most slots of its generation carried one bonus. Rainbow Riches carries three, and they are genuinely different organisms rather than one feature in three costumes — the reason this game is a landmark in the taxonomy.

Road to Riches is the pearl of the collection and the ancestor of every trail bonus in the modern UK catalogue. Three leprechaun scatters start it; a wheel spins, each spin advancing you along a trail of climbing multipliers; a “Collect” segment ends it. Per the published paytable the trail tops out at 500x. It is push-your-luck rendered as furniture, the direct descendant of the pub machine’s board-game top box, and it remains the best reason to load the game.

Wishing Well is the humble one: a pick between wells, one hidden multiplier, done in five seconds. A pick bonus in its most primitive published form — the sort of organ evolution keeps because it costs nothing.

Pots of Gold wants ceremony: pots orbit the screen, an arrow stops one, the pot’s multiplier pays. It is the trail’s showman cousin with less arithmetic underneath, and every player has a private ranking of the three within the first hour.

The base game around them is a plain 20-line five-by-three with a wild and card royals. It exists to deal the bonuses, and it knows it.

Why it endures

Legibility, again — but a different subspecies of it than the modern collectors offer. Rainbow Riches predates almost all of the anxiety of contemporary slot design. There are no cascades to track, no symbol-splitting arithmetic, no metastasising multiplier meters. Three distinct bonuses, each explainable in one sentence, at medium volatility that keeps a session moving without cliff edges. In an era shaped by the Gambling Commission’s game-design rules and the online stake limits, a calm, mid-variance design from 2006 turns out to look less dated and more prescient: it was built for small stakes and slow evenings in the first place, because that is what a pub machine was.

There is also plain inheritance. A design that UK players met in physical form twenty years ago carries recognition no marketing budget can purchase. The leprechaun is furniture in the cultural sense as well as the mechanical one.

The honest placard

Endurance is not the same as excellence, and the label must say so. The commonly published 95% figure sits visibly below the modern catalogue’s furniture, where 96%-and-something is the customary shelf — on published numbers alone, the classic charges more for the nostalgia than its successors charge for novelty. The 500x published ceiling, generous in the pub era, is now two orders of magnitude below what the high-volatility end of the lobby advertises; anyone shopping for the dream number has no business here, which the game, to its credit, never pretends otherwise.

Then there is the sprawl. The Rainbow Riches name has been franchised across a long shelf of sequels and spin-offs — picks, megaways, race days, cluster variants — of varying published maths and uneven charm. The brand now functions as a genus rather than a species, and the casual player who taps a lobby tile marked “Rainbow Riches” may be getting any of a dozen different organisms. This review concerns the original, and the original remains the best-balanced of the family.

One line in the writer’s own register, as always: a medium-volatility antique is still a slot, and the entertainment-pricing rule applies — set the evening’s figure before the first spin and let the trail be a show you have already paid for, not a debt it owes you.

Both columns of the ledger

Verdict

Rainbow Riches survives because it solved legibility twenty years before the industry decided legibility was the problem. Judged as a museum piece it is essential; judged on the published numbers it is merely adequate, and the placard should say both. Play the original rather than the sprawl, read the paytable where you play, and enjoy the trail for what it has always been — the best board game ever bolted to a fruit machine.