No floor, no side bet, and no excuse for the small stake

Blueprint Gaming opened Jackpot King in 2017 (the date comes from a licensed operator rather than from Blueprint), and the single most useful thing about it is a negative, which is why almost nobody writes it down: there is no minimum stake and no compulsory "side bet" (an extra wager that buys entry to the jackpot).

PlayOJO, a British operator with a licence obliging it to describe the rules correctly, states it in those words (no minimum bet, no mandatory side bet), and SpinGenie says the same thing in its own way (a blog post of its own, written for players), so any real-money spin on an eligible game is in the draw, whatever its size.

That sounds like a small mercy until you set it beside the machines of the nineties, where a stake under a published floor made the jackpot not unlikely but arithmetically impossible, and where the slice for the pot was taken from the under-floor spin anyway (Treasure Nile, at £4.50 a spin, is the standing example).

We have a page on the minimum stake because the difference between those two designs is worth more to a player than any seed. The structure is three pots, two of which carry a "ceiling" and must fall before they reach it, and here the sources fall apart in a way worth recording at length.

PlayOJO names them "Royal Pot" (seeded at £500, ceiling £3,500), "Regal Pot" (seeded at £5,000, ceiling £35,000) and "Jackpot King" (seeded at £100,000, with no ceiling at all). SpinGenie, equally licensed and equally obliged, puts £3,500 on the "Regal" and £35,000 on the "Royal", which is precisely the other way round.

A third operator shrugs and says that the two lower pots "usually restart at around £3,500 and £35,000" without naming which of them is which, although it is describing the same product that the other two describe. The figures, in other words, are solid. The mapping between a name and a figure is not, and for that reason the ladder below does not name the two capped pots at all.

Collect, spin again, or go to the wheel

The feature opens in one of two ways, and the second of them is the interesting one: either a "crown overlay" (a gold band laid across a symbol) lands on all five reels in a single spin, or the round begins for the round begins for no reason whatsoever (at random, on any spin, with the reels saying nothing about it).

From that point the game you were playing is replaced by a different game, which is where the design earns its reputation. The grid clears to show nothing but crowns, and every crown collected pushes a "prize ladder" up the right-hand side of the screen.

After each collection spin the player is given three choices, and this is the part that makes the feature unusual: take the cash the ladder has reached, spin again to climb it, or go straight to the "Wheel King" and gamble the lot. That wheel is the only route to the three pots, so a player who keeps taking the cash on the ladder will never see one.

It is reached either by the Wheel King icon appearing between spins or by collecting fifteen crowns (fifteen, which is a long way up the ladder), and when it is spun it pays a cash prize, a large multiplier of the stake, or one of the jackpots; a jackpot that falls goes back to its own seed and starts again. Two of those three outcomes are not progressive in any sense, and the distinction is not academic.

The cash prize and the "large multiplier" come out of the game's own payout mathematics and take nothing from a shared pot, which makes this product a hybrid rather than a pure progressive, and the difference is the thing most reviews of these games never mention.

A variant called Jackpot King Deluxe keeps the same three levels and changes the route: the Wheel King is reached by collecting Deluxe symbols, and the stated purpose is to make the two capped pots fall more often (which implies, without quite saying it, that they were not falling often enough). One more thing. A product called "Royal Jackpot King" is not a product.

We found no operator and no supplier describing anything of that name, and our guess is that somebody read the internal "Royal Pot" as a separate game and the error was then copied.

The one number we refuse to print

A figure circulates for this network that would be the most quoted statistic on the page if it were worth anything, which is that the top pot falls roughly once in every fifty million spins. It comes from an unattributed "industry estimate", no supplier stands behind it, and it appears on page after page without a source; so it has no place here as a number, however often it is repeated elsewhere!

What exists instead is the payout record, and although this network has been running since 2017 that record is short enough to set out in two sentences.

A spin on Deal or No Deal Megaways at PokerStars Casino paid a "Jackpot King" of €8,133,445.23 (roughly £7.19 million) on 30 April 2021, from a stake of €0.80; the trade press described it as the largest amount Blueprint's network had ever paid, and nothing we have found since has displaced it.

Before that, a player at Sky Vegas is reported to have taken £3.17 million on The Pig Wizard (a title still in the eligible list today), and the date usually given is 2017, which no source we read actually confirms. We print the amount and the operator, because those two are attested, and we leave the year with a question mark over it. Neither operator nor supplier publishes what share of a stake feeds these pots.

That means the contribution cannot be reconstructed here as it can on the Games Global pool, where base and total returns are both in circulation, and anybody quoting a percentage for Jackpot King is inventing one!

The ceilings are the part of this design that rewards reading twice, because a pot with a ceiling is a different proposition from a pot without one. If the lower pot is guaranteed to fall before it reaches about £3,500, then a player who finds the "counter" sitting at £3,400 is looking at an event that cannot be far away, and that is information the screen gives away for nothing.

The top pot has no ceiling, which means it has no such tell. It "seeds" at £100,000, it grows for as long as the network takes to open it, and the only honest thing anybody can say about the timing is that nobody has published a figure for it (and that we would distrust the figure if they had).

How many games, and why nobody agrees

The catalogue is the other place the sources disagree, and this time the disagreement is not an error. PlayOJO counts "over 60 eligible games" and SpinGenie counts "almost 40" (a gap of twenty titles, between two British operators describing one network), because an operator licences the titles it wants, and the "eligible list" is a property of the casino rather than of the network. The practical consequence is the one a reader will care about, and it is easily stated.

A game that carries the crown overlay at one house may not carry it at another, so the only reliable check is the game's own help screen at the casino where you happen to be playing, which is a sentence we would rather not have to write.

The titles we were able to confirm from the licensed operators we read go through Blueprint's back catalogue like a list of Blueprint's back catalogue with a crown bolted on: The Goonies, Fishin' Frenzy in three versions, Game of Thrones, King Kong Cash, Buffalo Rising Megaways, Deal or No Deal Megaways, Diamond Mine, Ted, Rick and Morty, The Naked Gun, Eye of Horus, The Pig Wizard, Genie Jackpots, 7s Deluxe, Mega Bars, Super Spinner, Winstar and Bison Rising Megaways (twenty-six in all, from three operators).

Blueprint added a second jackpot product in 2024 (June, on King Kong Cash DJ Prime8) for the opposite kind of player, and Rapid Fire Jackpots is built for small and frequent wins rather than for a six-figure seed; the company's own director of marketing said it "sits perfectly alongside Jackpot King", which is the politest possible way of saying that this one does not pay often. Three pots, two ceilings, no floor. That is the whole of it, and it is more than most pages manage.

Two British houses that carry Jackpot King

• Dove SlotsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd, domain Active in the public registerVisit
• Express WinsGambling Commission account 39175, Jumpman Gaming Ltd, white label domain in the public registerVisit

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