The 1995 Film "Jumanji" and the Slot That Shares Its Name
Image: imdb.com
Jumanji is a film from 1995. Sony Pictures' page for it lists that year and names Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst and Bonnie Hunt among its stars. That is the Jumanji this piece starts and finishes with. There is also a second thing answering to the name. It is a five-reel online slot that arrived more than two decades after the film, and inside it players roll dice. The two are not presented here as one story with two chapters. They are two things that share a name, and a shared name is the least informative connection there is: it tells you a word was reused and nothing else. So the order below follows the age of the things involved. First the film, as the studio page that carries it lists the film, in the few details that page states. Then the slot, as the provider that made it describes the slot, in the terms that provider uses. And then back to the film, the older of the two by more than two decades. Nothing here is drawn from anywhere else, and nothing here fills in what those pages leave unsaid.
The 1995 film, as its studio page lists it
Start with the movie, since it is the older of the two things carrying the name. Sony Pictures' page for the film lists it as 1995 and names Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst and Bonnie Hunt among its stars.
That is a short record, and deliberately so. Anything beyond those two anchors belongs to the viewer, to memory, or to the film itself. Readers who know the film will supply the rest without help; readers who do not now know exactly which Jumanji is under discussion, which is what the register entry is for. A year and a set of names are enough to point at one film and no other, which is all a reader needs before a second Jumanji enters the conversation.
It is also worth noting what the studio page settles by existing. When a word is attached to more than one thing, the question is always which thing has the first claim on it. Here the year answers that: 1995 is the earlier of the two dates in this article, by a wide margin.
The slot, as NetEnt lists it
The second Jumanji is an online slot. NetEnt's own game page presents JUMANJI® as a five-reel online slot by NetEnt, with a release date of 20-06-2018. The provider's branded-games page lists the Jumanji™ video slot among its branded titles, which places it in a particular part of NetEnt's catalogue without saying anything about the 1995 film one way or the other. NetEnt lists the slot's RTP as 96.33%, and that published percentage is the figure to hold on to when comparing this game with any other. A return-to-player figure is a theoretical long-run percentage rather than a forecast of any single session, which is why it is useful mainly as a point of comparison between games.
NetEnt's page also describes a Board Game bonus, in which players roll two six-sided dice to move a token around the board; NetEnt states that when the token lands on spaces in front of a Free Spin feature, that feature is activated, and that landing on the Mystery Feature space triggers a carousel awarding a Free Spin feature, a coin win of 2x to 10x the bet, or two extra dice rolls. Two dice, a token and a circuit of squares is the furniture of a tabletop game rather than a reel set, and the third of those carousel outcomes is the one that behaves most like one: extra rolls are not a payout but more turns, and a round that can extend itself is a round whose length is not fixed when it begins.
If you would rather see how a board-game bonus behaves before any money is involved, CasinoTop's online slots page offers free demo play of catalogued slot games with no signup or deposit, and its editors' picks table lists titles with their provider, a best-for angle, RTP, volatility and a demo link, which is a reasonable way to put one game's stated numbers next to another's.
So: a film from 1995, a slot from 2018, a name in common. Each of those two things is described above by the page that carries it, in the terms that page uses, and the distance between the two descriptions is the distance between a cast list and a dice mechanic.
Which returns the piece to where it opened. Of the two things that answer to the name, the film is the one that had it first: Sony Pictures' page lists Jumanji as 1995, and the slot NetEnt presents on its game page carries a release date of 20-06-2018, more than two decades later. The record the studio keeps names Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst and Bonnie Hunt among the film's stars, and that is the entry, complete on its own terms. A name can travel a long way from the thing it started with, through catalogues and release dates and feature lists. The entry stays where it is. Jumanji is a film from 1995, and Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst and Bonnie Hunt star in it.
