XE88 arcade games: from the horse-race board to the animal wheel

Beyond the slots and card tables, XE88 has a corner of arcade-style betting games. Our older notes called horse racing the most popular of them, a game that goes back to the early days of gambling machines. Newer titles reuse the same idea with fresh themes, including one built around the famous pocket monsters. They fall neatly into two families.

Family one: the race games

Three games share one engine. Six runners line up, you back them on a black or lantern-red odds board, and a short race decides the result.

• King Derby is the original: six pixel-art horses on a green track.
• Motorbike swaps the horses for dirt bikes and keeps everything else.
• Thunderbolt has six monkeys climbing poles and adds Banker, Tie and Player side bets.

The board in each is a grid of pairs, from 1-2 up to 5-6, with odds that change every race. In the screenshots they run from 3 for favourites up to 1000 for outsiders. Each board also carries a JACKPOT X3 X4 X5 line promising occasional boosted or free races.

Family two: the wheel games

• Forest Dance puts a lion, panda, monkey and rabbit around a ring of red, green and yellow segments, with an arrow in the middle.
• Pocket Monster, the one players call Pokemon, uses the same betting grid with cartoon monsters instead of animals.

Here you bet on cells in a grid, each with a multiplier. In Forest Dance they go from x5 on a green rabbit to x40 on a red lion. A Bank x2, Tie x9 and Player x2 side bet sits beside the grid in both games.

What they have in common

• Rounds are fast. A race or a spin is over in moments, which makes it easy to play far more rounds than you meant to.
• Big numbers mean rare results. A 1000 pair or a x40 cell is priced that way because it seldom comes in.
• Past results are just history. The last-results panels are interesting to look at, but they don't predict anything.
• The rules are in the game. The 2020 write-up left a lot unexplained, from the jackpot lines to the side bets, so read each game's help screen first.

Where to start

If you have never played any of them, King Derby is the easiest to follow. Set a coin limit, watch a race or two, and move on to the others once the board makes sense. The full list is in the XE88 arcade section, next to the slots and table games. Then, if you fancy a round, try the XE88 arcade games. 18+ only.