One act open to the whole house, two more for free account holders, and every rule in the prompt-book.
Crosspiece Menagerie is open to everyone: spin it on the home page or on its own page with free play coins. There is no name, email or password to give and nothing to tick.
Scoop Steeple and Wheezewhistle Steamer are kept for members of the company, and joining is free. Meringue’s form has four blanks to fill: nickname, email address, password, and the tick that says you are 18 or older. No blank asks for a card, a postal address or a telephone, since not one seat, scoop or deck chair on the pier is sold. Your account earns its place on the bill for two reasons: it holds your coins and progress in the wings until the next performance, and it keeps the acts for grown-ups. Strike it with one button on your account page and every trace leaves with it.
Your waistcoat pocket opens with 100,000 free coins, and anything the revue paid you in this browser is slipped in alongside. From there the revue, the kiosk and the steamer all draw on one balance, one level and one set of missions. Coins are virtual: no purchase, sale, withdrawal or exchange of them is possible, and a win on the pier is worth nothing in the real world.
There are no in-app purchases and no payment page anywhere on the pier.
Every act is five reels by three rows. Meringue counts a win from left to right, beginning with the first reel and moving reel to touching reel along a fixed payline. Your stake is shared out evenly, line by line; paytable values are multiples of the line bet, other than the scatter, which pays on the total stake. Should a line have two wins in it, it pays the bigger one and no more.
| Kind of turn | What the strings do | Acts |
|---|---|---|
| Tumbling reels | Every symbol in a win takes its bow and exits; the symbols above step down and new ones drop in from the flies. Each further win in the sequence is worth more: x1 on the spin itself, x2 on the next tumble, x3 on the one after, then x5 on every tumble beyond that. | Wheezewhistle Steamer |
| Multiplier that climbs like a kiosk cone | Once free spins start, the multiplier rises and never falls back during that round. | Scoop Steeple |
| Wilds pinned to their marks for a respin | When a paid spin pays nothing but a wild appears, every wild keeps its mark on stage and the remaining positions spin once more, free. | Crosspiece Menagerie |
| Last-reel respin | Two scatters on a paid spin that pays nothing spin the fifth reel once more, free, in search of a third. | |
| Free spins where each win counts twice | The simplest round on the bill: three scatters bring on free spins, and each win during them is doubled. |
Behind every reel hangs a fixed strip of symbols, like a painted backcloth on its batten. For each spin your browser’s random number generator drops every strip to an independent random stop. Yesterday’s spins have no part in today’s, and the reels pay no attention to your balance or to how many shows you have sat through.
Meringue rehearses every act on its own code for millions of spins, logs its return, hit frequency and feature frequency, and prints the results in its paytable. Those figures are about free coin play here and nothing else; they say nothing about any real-money game.
Curtain rule number one: only adults aged 18 or over are seated at Marionette Pier. The show is paid for in virtual coins of no monetary value, and buying, selling, withdrawing or exchanging them is never possible. From the kiosk to the gilded stage there is no coin shop and no payment page, no prize of real-world value is ever presented, and success here does not imply future success at real-money gambling.
Gambling taking more from you than a show should? Ring the National Gambling Helpline 0808 8020 133 for free, confidential support at any hour of any day · BeGambleAware · GamCare · Meringue’s house rules for safer play