What Fern Reel Guide is, and what it isn't

01 / The idea

An arcade with the money taken out

Fern Reel Guide is a small independent project built in New Zealand. It holds three games — a five-reel machine, a patience layout and a higher-or-lower card game — and one shared balance of virtual coins that tops itself up. That is the whole product. Nothing is locked, nothing is for sale, and there is no next tier to reach.

The reason for three games rather than thirty is that each one had to be built properly. Midway Lights runs a real twenty-position reel strip with a published paytable. Steam Vent Solitaire is full Klondike with draw-three and unlimited passes, not a simplified version that always solves. Driftwood Hi-Lo recalculates its multipliers from the cards genuinely left in the deck. You can read all of it on the rules page and check the numbers against what happens on screen.

How the coin balance works

Your first visit sets you up with 10,000 coins. The first time you open the site on any later day, a free top-up of 2,500 lands automatically, and if the day catches you below 1,000 the top-up lifts you back to that mark. Every game screen carries a reset control that puts the balance back to 10,000 whenever you feel like it.

The balance sits in your browser's local storage under a single key. There is no account, no email address and no copy on a server, which means the number is yours alone and travels nowhere. It also means a second browser or a private window starts fresh at 10,000, and clearing your site data wipes the lot.

What pays for it

Not much needs paying for. The site is a folder of HTML, CSS and one JavaScript file served as static files, so running costs amount to hosting. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate arrangement and no referral link to any gambling site — not as a policy we might revisit, but because that would make this a different kind of website entirely.

The illustrations, the game symbols and the fern-spiral mark were all made for this site. Nothing here borrows a real casino name, a real slot title or artwork from anywhere else.

Who it is for

Adults who enjoy the shape of these games and have no wish to stake money on them. It suits an idle ten minutes, and it suits learning how a five-line slot or a Klondike layout actually behaves when a bad decision costs you nothing at all.

It is not for anyone under 18, and it is not practice for real-money gambling. Free games like these have no cost attached, which changes how they feel and makes them a poor guide to anything else.