Stacker takes the old arcade tower game and turns it into a ten-floor cash-out ladder. A block slides back and forth above your tower; you stop it, and either it lands and the tower grows or it slips off and the round is over. What sets Stacker apart from other step-by-step games is that the risk is not constant. The block gets faster as the tower rises, so every floor is harder than the one below it, and the multipliers climb slowly at first and steeply near the top.
How to play
- Choose a difficulty (Easy, Medium or Hard) and place a bet between 100 and 10,000 credits, in steps of 100.
- Press Start stacking. The first block begins to slide.
- Press Stop. If the block lands, the tower is one floor higher and your multiplier rises. If it slips off, the round ends and the bet is lost.
- After any block that lands, a Cash out button shows what you would collect. Take it or keep stacking.
- A tower ten blocks high completes the run and pays the top multiplier automatically.
Is it a skill game? No. Each floor has 20 possible stopping points, and a fixed number of them make the block slip. Where the block stops is drawn at random with those odds; the sliding animation shows it, but your timing does not change it. Everyone gets the same chances.
How the floors get harder
| Floor | Easy: slips (of 20) | Medium | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| 3 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| 4 | 2 | 3 | 6 |
| 5 | 3 | 4 | 7 |
| 6 | 3 | 4 | 8 |
| 7 | 4 | 5 | 9 |
| 8 | 4 | 6 | 10 |
| 9 | 5 | 7 | 11 |
| 10 | 5 | 8 | 12 |
On Hard, the first block lands 85% of the time and the tenth only 40% of the time.
Multipliers
Easy: ×1.01, ×1.06, ×1.18, ×1.31, ×1.54, ×1.81, ×2.27, ×2.84, ×3.78, ×5.04.
Medium: ×1.06, ×1.18, ×1.39, ×1.64, ×2.05, ×2.56, ×3.41, ×4.88, ×7.51, ×12.51.
Hard: ×1.12, ×1.41, ×1.88, ×2.68, ×4.13, ×6.89, ×12.53, ×25.07, ×55.71, ×139.29.
And the chance of reaching each height from the start:
| Blocks stacked | Easy | Medium | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 81.2% | 68.9% | 51.0% |
| 5 | 62.1% | 46.8% | 23.2% |
| 7 | 42.3% | 28.1% | 7.7% |
| 10 | 19.0% | 7.7% | 0.7% |
Each multiplier is the fair price of the floors cleared, times 0.96, shown rounded down. So the expected return is 96% at every stopping point, on every difficulty: a house edge of 4%. Cashing out early or late changes the size and frequency of wins, not their average value.
Strategy
The first floors barely pay on Easy. One block returns ×1.01, almost exactly your bet. The early floors on Easy are where the odds are best and the reward is smallest; the value of playing Easy lies in getting to floors six to ten, where the multipliers start to move.
The last floors decide Hard. On Hard the multiplier more than doubles on each of the top three floors, and the chance of each block landing falls to 45% and then 40%. A tower of seven (×12.53) is reached about one round in thirteen.
Pick a height in advance. Because the average return is fixed, the useful decision is what kind of result you want. “Cash out at five” on Medium means winning a bit more than double, a little under half the time.
Ignore streaks and near-misses. A block that “almost” landed tells you nothing. Every floor is drawn fresh, and so is every round.
Bet small on long shots. A ten-block tower on Hard pays ×139.29, but appears roughly once every 145 rounds.
For a game with the same kind of ladder but steady odds on every step, try Penalty Shot.
If you enjoy Stacker, try Star Bonus Roulette or Star Voyage next.
