Honey Pot

A wasp fronted you twelve thousand and it comes to collect every night. It does not want the bank back — it wants to see you up by the quota when the doors shut, and it takes exactly that much. Everything you made over it stays yours to bet with, which is the only reason night nine is ever survivable.

How it goes#

• The quota is profit, not a balance. Night one wants 600 raised on a bank of 12,000. Night two wants 750, and it climbs by a quarter every night after that. Your bank only climbs if you make it climb, so the gap closes on you whether you like it or not.
• The table limit is a quarter of the bank, fixed when the night opens so a bad run of cards cannot shrink it under you. A night you overshot raises it for every night that follows. That is the whole engine, and it is why how far you clear matters as much as whether you clear.
• Clear early and you can leave early. Once you are up by the quota, Call it a night banks the clear on the spot. Staying at the table pays a score bonus and builds the capital that makes tomorrow easier — and risks the clear you already had. That is the decision the game is actually about.
• Bet to the number, not to the limit. The floor tells you what you are short by. Under a house edge the way to reach a target is the shortest odds that can still get you there in one hit, so a stake sized to the gap beats a stake sized to your nerve. Flat-betting the maximum until something lands is how most first runs end.
• Miss the quota and the run is over, unless you have Grace in your pocket. Running the bank down to nothing before the clock does ends the night the same way.
• Space is always whatever the big button says, wherever you are standing — deal, spin, drop, stand, take, roll, check. The stake sizes with `←` `→`, `Q` leaves the table, `C` sweeps a Roundel spread off the felt, and `1`–`9`, `0` and `-` pick a cabinet off the floor.
• Sound is on. `M` or the speaker in the corner of the status bar turns it off, and the cabinet remembers which you chose.

The tower#

Which floor you can reach is set by the night you are on. Nothing is ever taken away — the tower only opens up.

| Floor | Opens | What is on it |

| --- | --- | --- |

| The Parlour | Night 1 | Hive Reels, three reels where two alike pays a little and three pays properly. High Comb, higher or lower with the multiplier compounding until you take it. Blackjack, dealer standing on seventeen, naturals at 3:2, no splits |

| The Mezzanine | Night 3 | The Drip, a bead through twelve rows of comb into one of thirteen cells priced from ×0.3 in the middle to ×33 at the edges. Comb Dig, opening cells for a rising multiplier with one, three, five or ten wasps buried in the grid. The Bones, craps on two honest dice — the line at ×1.95, or one-roll bets out to ×34.6 on the boxcars. Texas Hold'em, heads-up against the wasp, where the ante posts a blind beside it and the raise is ×2 before the flop and ×1 after |

| The Gallery | Night 5 | Drone Race, six drones at six prices, where the price is the form. The Wheel, four bands across twenty-four segments — Amber on half of it, Jet on two segments at ×11.5. The Roundel, roulette on twenty-four numbers and the wasp's cell, from ×24 on one cell down to ×2 on half the felt |

| The Penthouse | Night 7 | Double or Nothing, one flip at ×1.96 and the only table in the building with no limit on the stake. The best price in the tower and the shortest road out of a bad night |

The Roundel is the one table where you set the odds rather than pick them off a list. Cover a single cell, a pair, a corner, an eight or half the felt — click the numbers, or use the eights and the outside bets down the bottom — and the stake is spread evenly over everything you have covered. The price is always twenty-four divided by the number of cells: ×24 on one, ×12 on two, ×6 on a corner, ×3 on an eight, ×2 on half. That is the true price of the bet with nothing shaved off it, which is why the wheel has twenty-four numbers and not thirty-six. On twenty-five pockets the wasp's own cell is exactly four in the hundred, so the house edge here is not in any of the prices — it is that one red cell on the left of the felt, and it is the same four honey everything else in the building keeps. When you are short by a known amount, this is the table that will quote you the shortest odds that still cover it.

Texas Hold'em is the table where the stake is not settled when the hand starts. Two cards to you and two face down to the wasp, five on the board, and the best five of your seven takes it. What you pick is when to raise: ×2 the ante before the flop, ×1 after it, ×1 once the last two cards are down — and the earlier you commit, the more you are allowed to commit, because the less you know when you do it. Check all the way to the river and the last window is play or fold, and folding hands the wasp the ante and the blind together. The blind is the catch, and it is the reason the table balances at all: it goes up beside the ante whether you like it or not, it only pays when you win and hold a straight or better — ×2 there, out to ×500 on a royal flush — and on any smaller win it simply comes back. Every hand you fold therefore costs you two bets rather than one, which is the price of being allowed to fold at all: seeing your cards while the wasp's stay face down is worth far more than four in the hundred, and the blind is what the house charges for it. The ladder is a better deal than a real casino's, and the raise is half the size of one — the wasp has no qualifying hand and never pushes your ante, it simply plays, and in exchange it will not let you put four antes behind a hand you like. Both of those are deliberate, and between them the table keeps the same four honey in the hundred as everything else in the building.

The Bones is the other table that lets you raise on information. Once the come-out sets a point, Behind the line puts the same again behind it at the point's own price — ×2.88 on a 4 or a 10, ×2.4 on a 5 or 9, ×2.11 on a 6 or 8 — and the two stakes settle together when the point is made or the seven finds it. It is not the free odds a real craps table offers, because a bet with no house edge in it would be worth more than anything in the back room. The dice, at least, are exactly what they look like.

What the house keeps#

Every table returns about 96% of what is staked, and each one wears that in its own arithmetic rather than in a fudge factor bolted on afterwards — the odds on a High Comb button, the cells under The Drip and the band prices on The Wheel are all 0.96 divided by the true chance. The Roundel is the one that gets there the way a real casino does, by paying the true odds exactly and keeping a single cell out of twenty-five. Hold'em gets there the way a card room does, by raking the pot: a winning hand is paid ×0.96 on the ante and on the play bet behind it. It is the one table whose edge cannot be worked out with a pencil, because what it returns depends on how well the hand is played — so it was measured instead, over six hundred thousand hands against a player who folds and raises correctly, and the blind's ladder was set from that until it came out at four in the hundred like everything else. Where the tables differ is variance, not value: Blackjack grinds, the edge cells of The Drip do not, and neither is a better deal than the other.

Clearing a night pays a ticket and clearing it by a mile pays three, which is what the back room runs on. Six charms are for sale between nights and nothing is refundable. Long Straw doubles the table limit, which doubles what a well-sized bet can do; Grace costs eight tickets and buys one whole mistake.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when the wasp finally collects; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board ranks on score, which is nights cleared and how far over each one you went — never the size of the bank, so one lucky bead cannot buy a place on it. The arcade page has the longer version of how that works, and the other cabinets.