How to play
Tonga
Always a prize!
Play a game and Tonga will pay you a prize, every game, always.
Your prize could be anything between 1% and x50, but it is not a number that drops out of the sky. Your score determines your prize. You could very well have a great score and win a lousy amount, but you can also win a great amount with a lousy score. There is an important rule though:
Higher scores give higher prizes, on the average.
Tonga is a skilled add-on. No random whatsoever is used to determine the outcome. Your score, combined with numbers already mentioned on the device, determines the outcome. The same numbers + the same score = the same outcome. Use this to your benefit, where the most important rule is:
Higher scores give higher prizes, on the average.
Higher scores give higher prizes, on the average.
You play a game and then Tonga comes to live. You see the amount and percentage you won going up...and up...ever faster.
Till it stops. Then you know what you won and you see the amount arriving at your L$ balance.
Good girls like myself go a long way making sure my setups are fair. But you might like a little more info that that. Look on the backside of the Tonga where you see a table.
In that table Threshold shows a minimum score. If you beat that score (and not beat any of the higher other scores) that row applies to your prize.
The column Normal shows the average percentage you can expect to win. Max. is not the highest percentage you can win, that is always 5000%, but often you stay below Max, and Seed some fancy number that makes it difficult (but not impossible) for you to determine which score would give which prize.
Such a table with Threshold
and Average, it does look very familiar to variable games. This is what Tonga is, a variable game where the prize is also variable, the higher the score the higher the prize range, then Luke did a lot of math to make sure it averages out to the averages shown.
The disadvantage of seeing it that way is that it does not sound fancy. So, let's explore another way of looking at it. One could make a setup that would do almost the same as Tonga when combining 6 wheels, each with a different target score, of which one of the target scores is 0. Rather large wheels, cause Tonga has 5000 different prizes. This makes it sound a whole lot more to my liking: Tonga is 6 gigantic wheels compressed in a box.
A pretty box.
A few words about that average. How can we know the average outcome already, if you could apply skill to get a higher outcome?
We cannot.
The average is the average outcome for a score range when players do not apply any skill whatsoever other than needed for reaching the score required.
If you manage to squeeze more L$ out of Tonga, the bill goes to the owner of the Tonga, not to other players.
Also, your prizes are in no way dependent on prizes paid before to others. Seeds are generated at random (and are visible before the game starts)
With Tonga you win at least something, every game you play. Sometimes just a few L$, and sometimes a lot, even with a modest score.
In my setups (see the backsides of the Tongas), the ones in the first row get generous with already modest scores but for the real high amounts large scores are needed. The ones on the last row do pay smaller prizes for modest scores but the scores needed for real high amounts are also modest. The row in between sits in the middle of these extremes.