Win@Roulette

To the uninitiated, poker is a lottery, a game of chance in which victory depends entirely on the luck of the draw. The existence of world champions like Stu Ungar and Jonny Moss (Google told us) disprove that intuition. The cards may come out randomly, but making the right choices with them requires mathematical prowess and psychological cunning.

While the mathematics are important, psychology is by far the greater part of success at poker. A reasonably dedicated amateur will soon memorise the probabilities attached to the various hands and scenarios, but the real masters prevail elsewhere, two feet above the table, in the baffling labyrinth of their opponents' minds.

There's no credible world championship of roulette, for the same reason that nobody tosses coins for a living. There's not much glory in games so dependent on chance, and roulette, once you've assimilated the probabilities, is just that – one part maths and a hundred parts luck.

A strange idea, then, to create a game that reproduces this corner of the casino, and omits the rest. If we at Pocket Gamer were cynics, we might suggest that Sprite Interactive, with its series of Win@ games, is trying to squeeze the casino for more than it's worth by taking it to pieces and selling the parts. Will Sprite prove us wrong?

If looks are anything to go by, not really. The roulette table is fairly ordinary, although, to be fair, there are only so many whistles and bells you can hang on a roulette game. The lingering animation that accompanies the spinning of the wheel is well-rendered, but the fact that the wheel doesn't slow to a halt, with the ball skipping uncertainly from number to number, is more disappointing than you'd imagine.

The game itself is as complete a recreation of roulette as you could hope for, but it steadfastly refuses to be anything more. You get a table comprising a grid of red and black squares, distributed in a strange pattern, and the option to place a chip on one of these numbered squares, or on the boundary between two or four of them to spread the bet for lower odds.

Up the side of the table are a range of compound bets to choose from, like set meals from a Chinese restaurant: All Black, All Red, First Dozen, Odd, Even, and so on. Once you choose a bet, you have to decide how much money to stake on it. Likewise, if you're placing a range of bets across the table, you have to decide how much each of these is worth.

Short of being gimmicky – and this game is certainly not that – there's not much Sprite could have done to pad Win@Roulette out, but there are plenty of options to satisfy a pedantic wheel-spinner. Along with the standard Sound: Off, you have the choice to view your currency in dollars or pounds, decide how much you start with, play on an American or British table (basically identical), or turn off some of the compound bets.

The same criticism applies to Win@Roulette as to all computer versions of games where the object is to accumulate money: what, in the name of sweet zombie Jesus, is the point?

Poker sidesteps the criticism by being a fascinating game in itself, particularly when there are other people involved. Business management games, similarly, succeed because the plate-spinning pursuit of success is itself enjoyable.

Roulette is largely a game of luck, but you can make success more likely by playing the right bets over and over again. You'll know you've learned how to play not when you fluke a smash-and-grab bonanza, but when 1,000 spins vindicate your patient deference to Probability, Fortune's more powerful sister.

Win@Roulette contains several well-written pages of instructions to teach you not only what the various bets mean and how they work, but how to recognise and manipulate probability. At the table, meanwhile, each move is labelled with its odds of success, leaving you in no doubt as to the risk.

If you read the rules and follow them, you'll have done all you can to ensure that you'll win, and deviance from them, barring moments of jammy glory that you don't by rights deserve, will be punished. So what, in the name of holy mummy Joseph, is the point?

The clue is in the title. Win@Roulette isn't a game so much as a guide, and a very decent one. Some whistles and bells would have been nice – a few amusing quotes about roulette, a career mode – but the fact remains that if you play this game for long enough, read the rules, and master the maths, you really will improve your odds at winning real money at a real life roulette table.

You just won't have very much fun.