Several months ago I started playing a fun game by Arcade Colony called Stake House Den. Unlike other games they have produced liked Splinterlands this game is all about casino gaming, without risking the cash. It's been a couple months since I have done an update post on this and it's long overdue!
I decided to play this game with a different mindset than other games, this one is just for fun. Other play to earn games (there have been a few) I wanted to earn. The first one I got involved in was Axie Infinity and even ran a scholarship program. I actually made some decent money in that one before the market crash! Then came Splinterlands which was great fun, and a few others I won't mention.
This game is a lot of fun, you are playing against the house just like a casino. So no direct competition against other players except maybe in the leaderboard stats! It's really not hard to play, you just have to strategize to earn as much COLONY as possible, which is the rewards token. To get started you'll want to stake some COLONY, buy some SCRIPT tokens, and some Lady Luck packs. For more of a starter guide you can see my earlier post here.
When I logged in today I found a new menu I hadn't seen before. So, of course, I checked it out! It's kind of nice that it displays all of your tokens and packs that you have in your inventory. When I took the screenshot here it was after some transactions that you will see later on, but I decided to add this in so you can see how easy it is to see everything in one place now.
To get started in the game today I decided to do my usual opening of a couple Lady Luck packs. Before I got started I went into shop on the Arcade Colony homepage and purchased two of them using eight SCRIPT tokens which I had purchased and imported before getting started today. That's done on the Arcade Colony homepage as well and is pretty self explanatory. I also purchased ten gold and legendary FLUX tokens each as these are important to increase your odds of getting some good pulls!
Then one Stake House Den homepage you simply click packs and press open packs.
Here you will indicate how many packs to open and how much gold and legendary FLUX to use. For each pack you will want to use five as there are five cards in each pack. In this case I used ten on each as you can see below.
I proceeded to open the packs and crossed my fingers for some good luck!
Unfortunately I didn't pull any legendary Joker cards, but I did pull a couple of gold cards. Today I also didn't pull any cards allowing me to merge or upgrade cards for the first time. However, I will leave a link here to my early guide explaining how to do that and most basics in the game here.
It's been some time since I had last played as to build up a lot of HOT SAUCE. Here I ran into a bit of a problem. My fridge has a HOT SAUCE cap of 4,000 and I have over 8,000 waiting to be claimed as you can see circled in blue. If I claim the full amount at my current cap I will lose over half of the tokens. HOT SAUCE is the currency you use to place bets, so I don't want to lose any. As a result I elected to expand my fridge which you can see circled with yellow, it shows up when you hover over the HOT SAUCE icon.
To get to Tier 4 it cost me 25 SCRIPT tokens. I decided to do it as the Hive prices are relatively low right now making it a slightly less expensive endeavor. It adds 27,250 to the fridge capacity for a total of 31,250 capacity to store more tokens.
And here's the transaction screen, very simple to complete. You can pay in credits, put that would require buying them with fiat, something I like to avoid.
And circled in blue you can see my new elevated HOT SAUCE capacity. I won't have to worry about this for a very long time now! I then claimed the tokens and had over 9,800 HOT SAUCE to play casino gaming!
I have previously played the roulette and slots, but I prefer Black Jack. There is poker coming down the line at some point soon!
Black Jack
Since I had a large HOT SAUCE balance I elected to go with large bets of 1,000 at a time to maximize my potential COLONY token winnings. My very first hand I immediately pulled a black jack winning 17.35 COLONY!
Here was a fun hand, one where I had a chance to use the split function. As you can see I have two eights. My personal rule of thumb in the game is to only split aces and eights, although I know other people are more aggressive with splits.
So I added another thousand HOT SAUCE to the bet and split them.
And the dealer busts, so I won on both hands winning 23.052 COLONY!
Another hand right after I got another black jack, talk about luck!
Here's another good instructional hand. I had a fourteen against the dealer up card of 5. If I were to hit here there is a pretty good chance I would bust and lose the hand. I elected to let the dealer take the chance here as they have to hit all the way until they have at least 17.
And I got lucky as they went bust once again!
But you can't win them all. Here was my first loss of the streak!
The dealer pulled a twenty to my seventeen. Oh well... That's why it's called gambling!
And just for illustration, as I was running low on HOT SAUCE my bets decreased. Here I bet 200 and got a black jack but only won 2.45 COLONY.
The lesson being that the more HOT SAUCE you bet per hand the more you can win. If I were to compare the last black jack to the first you will notice that if I were to multiply the last hand by five I would be winning five less COLONY than I would at the bet of 1,000 HOT SAUCE. So it really only makes sense to play when you have a very high HOT SAUCE balance. That means either staking more SCRIPT and opening more packs or playing less often to let it build up. I'm going with the latter as I'm playing this for fun, not profit!
And my total winnings were pretty good, just under 100 COLONY! By far the best I have ever done playing a session before!
And then to the leaderboard. I'm far from 1st place, but still managed to come in 10th place. I notice my friend 
One thing I have noticed is that winnings in Stake House Den are much lower than the game MoonKarts. I would like to see that discrepancy fixed to encourage more people to play the game. It's a fun game, but it needs higher rewards to incentivize more play!
I hope you found my post instructive on how to expand your fridge and to win some more COLONY by betting more HOT SAUCE. I'm currently in cool down phase as my HOT SAUCE builds up, but I'll share some more casino action when I get back up to around 10,000 tokens again.
Thanks for taking the time to check out my post and I do hope you enjoyed it. As I mentioned this one I am playing just for fun, not for profits. Although profits can be made by selling some of your cards on the market place, but volume there is still hit and miss. I have a few cards for sale but no takers as of yet. I hope you all have a great day, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below!
References:
Disclaimer
I am not a financial planner and this isn't financial advice. Please always do your own research before investing your money. You worked hard enough to earn it!
Screen Shots property of Arcade Colony
Header generated with ideogram.ai
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