Who doesn’t want to get paid for playing video games? This series follows mobile applications, some of which are borderline games at best, that claim to reward users with cold hard cash (or gift cards). In my pursuit of extra cash to blow on games, or Steam gift cards to add to my collection, I have tried a number of these applications. I hope my experiences can help others steer clear of the more dubious of these applications.
This time we’ll be looking at Club Vegas: Classic Slot Machines with Bonus Games, hereafter Club Vegas, a free-to-play mobile game released by Bagelcode in 2017. As the full title states, this is a simulation of playing various slot machine games, but it does not involve gambling with real money. The way that you can get paid for playing this game is through third-party referral services, which at the time of this writing I know Stormplay is currently offering.
Hopefully most readers are familiar with what a slot machine is, but for anyone that is not it boils down to you spending virtual coins to spin a wheel, and you win coins if certain combinations of images come up. (As bonus reading, here is a link to the Wikipedia page on slot machines.) You gain experience points for each spin, which culminates in your account level increasing. Each level you gain some bonus coins and you may unlock a new game.
To help prevent you from running out of coins, you get free coins every 15 minutes, which is the small pile at the bottom center of the screenshot above. There are also 3 sets of daily challenges, which you earn coins for completing These challenges are usually just things you do while playing the game normally: winning a certain number of spins, winning a certain amount in a specific game, winning a certain number of free spins, etc.
Each set of challenges usually has around 8 to 10 individual items. Completing six challenges from a set finishes that daily challenge, giving a large coin reward and making the rest of those challenges locked for the rest of the day. There is also a fourth set of challenges if you join a Club, or group of other player.
The game tries to promote a social atmosphere, providing a global chat and granting more coin reward opportunities to Club members. When playing, it also tends to bombard you with requests to Like other players wins or new players joining a game. As a member of a club, hitting the Like button on the News Feed gives you more coins as well.
That about covers the basics of the game; it is a fairly simple slots app. The application is free to play, but monetized through a combination of ads and in-app purchasing. The ads are not mandatory, but watching one rewards you with coins and is typically a daily challenge to complete. I personally found that the game gave you plenty of opportunities to earn free coins through challenges and clubs, and I would strongly advise against spending real money for fake money to gamble away.
The main sound track seemed a bit like elevator music to me, and I personally did not care for it. Each game did seem to have its own music, and some effects, which is a nice touch. I usually just leave the sound off. The art is also well done, for what it is, which you can probably judge for yourself from the above screenshots.
Often times when I write these articles, it is on a game that I had played several months ago. In this case, I just finished getting paid for playing this one, so I’ve got some solid numbers to share. With the service I was using, the goal was to get to level 60 to earn about $3 in rewards. I would estimate this took around 30 hours of time playing the game.
However, since Club Vegas has an auto-spin feature, I was able to do this mostly by just leaving my phone plugged in and spinning away. Occasionally I would need to click on a mini-game or to acknowledge winning free spins, but it wasn’t hard to do while watching videos or movies. In comparison to a lot of other applications that you can be rewarded for playing, this one did not take too much active effort to complete.
Overall, I would give it a “B”, or a 7.5/10 stars. Simulated slots are not really my game of choice, and I might rank it lower if not part of this series. Though, as a way to earn some rewards it was a fairly painless experience. It currently has a 4.7/5 stars on the Google Play store.
If you want to check Club Vegas it is available on the Google Play store here. As fair warning, if you are using a reward service, then you likely need to download it through them to get paid.