Jackpot: Set The Reel Preview – Winner, winner, cherry dinner

A preview copy of Jackpot: Set The Reel was kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

When I was a kid, there was a local arcade that had a mixture of coin-op games and fruit machines (or one-armed bandits if you remember back that far). While I’ve never been a big gambler, I remember vividly one particular fruit machine called the Tupenny Nudger. So-called because it cost 2p per spin but had a massive jackpot of £2.40. What a rush when that rolled in! Jackpot: Set The Reel aims to stimulate that same dopamine source but without forming a nasty gambling addiction. While it doesn’t feel like a fruit machine, and nor could it really, it does some things that give you that same giddy excitement when three 7s roll in.

Jackpot is a card game which shares one trait with one of my other favourite card games: Scout (you can read my review of Scout here). When you pick your hand of cards up, you cannot change the order of the cards in your hand. What’s more, you have to choose a direction to fan/splay your hand, and that cannot change for the whole game either. Strict rules in this casino. Some of the cards in your hand are colourful representations of icons from the fruit machine reels; melons, cherries, bells and the like. Some have the icon but are grey instead of colourful.

On your turn, you choose three adjacent cards from your fanned-out hand and lay them in front of you. If the first icon is coloured, you win a coin – yay! If the second one matches the first, you win a bonus token you can use later for extra stuff. If all three match, you win one of the achievement cards with some stars on it. Stars are the name of the game in Jackpot, so the stars you earn from the achievement cards and the upgraded/replaced cards are what you’re gunning for.

Layer cake

You might be asking yourself a very relevant question now. “If I can’t change the order of the cards in my hand, how do I lay down matching sets of three?”. The answer comes in the way you take your cards back into your hand. You see, each set of three cards you place down, you place on top of the cards before them, just leaving the tops of the previous cards visible. At the end of the round, you pass your remaining card around the table, and your newly acquired card goes on the bottom of one of your columns of cards. You choose a column, then get the coins indicated on the tops of the cards as your income.

When you pick the cards back up, you choose a column at a time and stack them in any order. So, the last card in one column is next to the first card in the next column. If you’d been playing cleverly in the previous round, you might have placed melon cards on top of melon cards, setting things up for the next round. Those cards are now next to one another, meaning you can lay them down in a row and Bingo! Or rather, Jackpot.

This combination of trying to do well in the current round whilst setting things up for the next round is at the heart of Jackpot. And you know what? It’s tricky. It’s really tricky. You can spend your winnings on upgrading the cards in your hand, which helps. Sometimes the card icons stay the same, but with bigger benefits on them, or stars. Sometimes the icon changes when you upgrade it. So that lowly bell sat between two grapes might be flipped to change to a third grape, and a win. You can also buy more power cards to replace the ones in your hand, but it’s strictly one in, one out.

Final thoughts

Jackpot: Set The Reel is an odd beast. When I first saw it at this year’s UK Games Expo, I thought it looked cute. Nothing that really set it apart from the crowd, but nothing to complain about either. Now that I’ve played it quite a few times, I have to admit I’m surprised in a lot of ways. It’s a much deeper, much heavier game than I was expecting. Yes, you can play it fast and loose, try to cash in on what’s in your hand and hope for the best in the next round, and that’s fine. But if you want to do well and compete with other people who know the game, you really need to plan. Despite only playing three sets of three cards in each round of the game, the forethought required is really something.

I wonder if that hidden depth will be off-putting to some people. I had a look at BGG out of interest, and while the page is still young, the weight rating of 2.00 at the time of writing is misleading to me. It’s for that reason that I think Jackpot will go down really well with gamers who have families that are game-curious, but not really into ‘those complicated games full of rules you keep buying’ (to quote my own family). They’ll still get that lovely little feeling when they lay down a winning row, or better yet, when laying down a row moves other cards in their hand next to one another, making another winning row. That’s a really cool feeling, just like what happens in Scout. You though, you brain-burning board game goblin, you can still enjoy a puzzle that’ll really get your grey matter in a muddle.

Jackpot: Set The Reel is a clever, unique card game which does a surprisingly good job of evoking the feeling and ambience of fruit machines. When you consider that pledges for the game start at £17, and that you could easily burn through £20 in a couple of minutes on the gambler at your local pub, it’s a bit of a bargain really.

You can find out more and back the Jackpot: Set The Reel campaign over at the Kickstarter campaign page from Monday 11th August 2025.

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