Game page
The Great Albini, and the oldest trick in the trade
A stage magician on five reels, from a small studio distributed by a very large one, and a game whose theme happens to describe the business it sits in. Where the catalogues disagree about its figures, we say so.
A magician on five reels, and a theme that tells on itself
Every so often a game arrives whose subject is an accidental commentary on the trade that sells it, and a slot machine about a stage magician is the clearest case of it we have come across. The Great Albini, built by the small studio Foxium and distributed into Canadian lobbies by the supplier now called "Games Global" (and called "Microgaming" for most of its life), puts a conjuror on the reels and asks a player to enjoy being fooled by him, which is a bargain nobody is pushed into.
A stage magician and a slot machine are in the same line of work, which is the management of attention, and both of them are extremely good at it. The magician shows a hand, a hat and a cloth, and the audience looks exactly where it is invited to look. A slot shows reels, a "paytable" (the table of combinations and prizes) and an animation, and the player looks at the animation rather than at the table.
Neither of them is lying in any useful sense of the word (no claim is made that turns out to be false), and both of them are arranging what gets noticed and what does not. What the game shows is the spectacle, and what it does not show is the "build" it is running (the particular version of the title a house licensed), which is the only thing deciding what the game returns.
We find that symmetry pleasing enough to have kept this page when the rest of the site was rewritten, and the address is the one it always had (a "301" redirect would have cost the readers who were still arriving at it).
What the catalogues agree on, and where they do not
A site paid by the casinos that carry a game has an interest in filling a page with confident figures, and the obvious objection is that nobody can tell from outside whether the figures are real. Our answer here is to publish the disagreement rather than to resolve it, because resolving it would mean choosing a number that nobody has sourced (a choice the "catalogues" make daily, and one we decline). A disagreement between two "catalogue" entries (neither of which cites a source) is itself a fact about how little of this trade can be verified from outside it.
The entries agree on the shape of the thing. Five reels, a stage set, a bonus round built around the magician's apparatus, and a release in the second half of the last decade (the studio and the distributor are both on the record, and neither of those two facts is in any doubt).
They do not agree on the return, and the gap between them is not a rounding error of the kind two honest sources might produce, but a difference wide enough that a player would notice it over a long evening. The figures we hold for this title differ between entries, not one of them says where its number came from, and the "RTP" (the share of stakes a game returns over a very long run) is in any case a property of the "build" rather than of the title.
So the number is not printed anywhere on this page (not even as a range), and its absence is the point of it. A reader who wanted a figure has instead been told that the figure is unsettled, which is more useful to him than a confident average. We would rather a reader left with the knowledge that the figure is unsettled than with a figure that looked settled because we printed it; a page that prints the friendlier of two numbers has made a choice it is not entitled to make.
That is the whole method of this site compressed into a single decision, and it is the reason a licence number sits in the place where a "rating" would sit on any other site in the segment.
The part of a themed slot that actually matters
The theme of a game changes nothing in its arithmetic, and it changes a good deal in the experience of playing it, and keeping those two statements apart is most of what a reader needs, because the trade keeps them deliberately joined. A magician's stage, a vampire's castle and a row of fruit all return whatever the "build" returns, and the artwork is a cost the studio paid long before the game shipped to anybody.
What a theme does change is duration, and duration is the variable that quietly decides what an evening costs a player who has not written a figure down beforehand. A game that is pleasant to sit in front of is one a player sits in front of for longer; the cost of a session is the stake multiplied by the number of spins (not by the number of minutes that felt well spent).
Here is the sum, with figures you can replace with your own. A player staking C$0.40 a spin at five hundred spins an hour (a rate an "autoplay" setting reaches without effort) places two hundred dollars of stake in that hour, and at a return in the region of ninety-six per cent the hour costs him about eight dollars on average, which is the one figure on this page that a reader can check against his own evening.
Two such hours cost sixteen dollars, and the artwork is identical in both of them, which is the quiet arithmetic of a "theme" and the reason we treat artwork as a cost rather than as a feature. The artwork is also, we would point out, the only part of the game that a player can judge before putting money in it!
A lobby that carries it?
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Where it sits, and what we could not read
The title belongs to the studio and reaches a Canadian lobby through the distributor, which means the same game sits behind many different front doors and behaves the same way behind all of them. The houses in our index that carry it reach it through the "Games Global" platform, and no house can alter the mathematics of a title it has merely licensed from somebody else, because the arithmetic travels with the build and not with the lobby.
What a house decides is the surroundings, and the surroundings are what the cards on this site compare, because that is where the differences between two doors actually live. The licence and the authority that issued it, the currency the account is held in (a path containing "/ca/" usually means a Canadian "ledger"), the method the money arrives by and the route it takes back out are all choices of the operator rather than of the studio.
We should be plain about the limits of what this page rests on. We have not played this game, and we have not opened an account anywhere in order to read its "paytable" from the inside; the brands on this platform answer a request from outside Canada with a refusal (an "HTTP 403", the server declining by location), so even the lobby listing could not be read from this desk.
The catalogue entries are therefore the source for the structure, the studio and the distributor. The return is left blank, and the four boxes on each card record which facts about a house could be established (the "Canadian site" reading, for instance) and which could not.
The trick, and the part that is yours
The pleasure of watching a magician depends on knowing there is a method and agreeing not to look for it, which is a bargain an audience makes freely and gets real value from ("the willing suspension", as the phrase has it). A slot machine offers the same bargain with one difference that matters a great deal. The method costs money, and the audience is paying for the show by the minute (five hundred spins of it an hour) rather than by the ticket.
That is not an argument against playing it, and we would not pretend otherwise. A show is worth paying for, and eight dollars an hour is a cheap evening by the standards of almost any other entertainment on offer (a cinema ticket, for one)! It is an argument for knowing the price of the "ticket" before the curtain goes up, which on a reel-spinning stage means before the first spin rather than after the hundredth.
So the thing to carry away from a page about a conjuror is the least magical habit available, which is arithmetic done in advance. Decide the stake, decide the hour, do the multiplication once; then let the game show you whatever it wishes to show you with the figure already settled. The method will still be hidden, and you will have stopped paying to look for it.
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Questions readers ask
Who made The Great Albini?
The studio is Foxium, a small developer, and the game reaches Canadian lobbies through the distribution arrangement of the supplier now called "Games Global" (and previously "Microgaming"). The studio designs the game and the distributor puts it in front of players, which is why a small name can appear in a very large catalogue.
What return does the game have?
The catalogue entries we hold do not agree, and the honest answer is that we did not choose between them: where two sources give different figures for the same title we say so, and where we cannot establish which is right we leave the number out rather than pick the friendlier one. The figure a player actually meets depends on the "build" a particular house licensed, which no lobby displays.
Why does this page exist at all?
Because the address existed on the earlier version of this site and still had readers arriving at it, so retiring it would have broken a link that somebody was using. Keeping an address alive and rewriting what sits behind it is the better of the two options.
Is a themed slot different from any other slot?
Not in its mathematics, which is set by the build and not by the artwork, and that is worth saying because a theme is the part a player remembers and the part that changes nothing. What the theme does change is how long a session feels, which is a real effect with no entry in the paytable.
By the Canadian Dollar Casinos editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · Online since 2012
