The story
Fiction and adapted settings written by Akitsora Gaming for this title, including invented dialogue and events. This is not a historical or folklore reference. The rules and specification tables define the gameplay and math.
In Edo of the An'ei era, paper lanterns light an inventor's workshop.
One turn of the wooden crank sends blue-white sparks leaping from metal to metal.
I. The Curious Box from Nagasaki
During the An'ei era of the Edo period, the restless polymath Hiraga Gennai—naturalist, mining engineer, satirist, and pioneer of Western painting—acquired a broken wooden apparatus imported through the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki. Known as an elekiter, the device was a hand-cranked friction generator designed to store static electricity.
Bringing the mystery box back to his Edo workshop, Gennai spent years studying its glass cylinder and tinfoil conductors until he restored it to working order. The game frame is that very machine, its five reels populated with conductive copper plates, iron nails, tin foil, and brass bells.
II. A Crank of the Handle and a Leaping Arc
On every spin, Gennai stands beside the wooden cabinet and gives the crank a brisk turn. Whenever static charge builds inside the jar and fires with a sharp crack, a blue-white spark leaps out from a metal symbol on the first reel and jumps one reel rightward to the nearest adjacent metal piece.
Every cell the electric arc touches along its path turns into a wild spark for that spin before the fixed paylines are scored, frequently bridging several lines at once while townsfolk crowding the workshop doorway gasp, step back in surprise, and lean in for a closer look.
III. Building Voltage to a Full Circuit
Each time the electric arc jumps from one reel to the next across the metal pieces, the spin's jump multiplier increases by one step. If no metal symbol sits within reach on the next reel to the right, the current stops there and applies the multiplier it has gathered so far.
When metal symbols align all the way across the board so the spark leaps from the first reel clear through to the rightmost reel without breaking, the machine completes a full circuit, ringing the brass bells and doubling the entire multiplier of that arc on the spot.
IV. Leyden Jars in the Night of Dutch Learning
Landing enough glass Leyden jars anywhere on the board opens the Night of Dutch Learning bonus round. Here the elekiter discharges on every single spin from both sides of the board at once—one arc jumping left to right and a second jumping right to left—before adding both multipliers together.
Every new Leyden jar that lands during the feature sticks in place for the rest of the round and acts as a conductor that multiplies any arc passing through it, culminating in a blazing grand circuit when a full arc threads multiple jars. It is the game's theme, not a promise: Gennai's workshop is historical theatre, while every spin's outcome is still decided by the RGS random number generator.