Editorial team

Étienne Marchal

Étienne Marchal, 54, spent fifteen years repairing pinball tables and arcade cabinets before he started writing about slot machines. That first career left him one habit: open the cabinet before giving an opinion. On Vampire Slots he tests every game in demo mode to a fixed protocol — at least three hundred base-game spins at a constant stake, a record of small-win frequency, then a full pass through the paytable and the rules screen to check what the studio actually claims. Anything he cannot verify himself is attributed to its source or left blank. He writes the game pages and the casino reviews, and will happily say that a title is slow, expensive or derivative: a slot machine is judged on its behaviour rather than its artwork.

Published work (55)

Editorial team

Camille Roussel

Camille Roussel, 29, taught statistics in a secondary school before joining the newsroom. She runs the blog: how to read a return-to-player figure, what the volatility label really covers, what a bonus-buy button changes, how cascades and locked-symbol respins behave. Her writing rule is simple — every claim rests on a specific game from this catalogue and its published figures, never on an example invented for the occasion. She spends as much time dismantling received ideas — the spin that is "due", the machine running "hot" — as explaining mechanics.

Published work