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Publisher: Phantom EFX
Developer: Phantom EFX
System requirements: Windows XP 32-bit with administrator rights, 1 GB Intel Pentium IV, Celeron or AMD CPU or better; 1 GB RAM; 64 MB DirectX 9.0c- or OpenGL 2.0-compatible graphics card; DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card; 2 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Casual
Release date: Available now
Millions of people around the world visit gambling casinos every day. From the elegant and opulent gaming houses of Monte Carlo to the noisy, garishly appointed casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City, players come from far and wide to spend money for a chance to make money. Game developer Phantom EFX has been feeding the gambling need for years with games such as Reel Deal Slots Adventure and Reel Deal Slots: Treasures of the Far East. But there’s more to gambling than just slot machines, so Phantom has brought the complete casino experience to the PC with Reel Deal Casino: Imperial Fortune.
Imperial Fortune is a collection of more than 60 games, including variations of poker and blackjack, roulette, craps and sports wagering. The card games seat you and as many as seven AI opponents around realistic-looking felt surfaces. Roulette simulations feature a closeup view of the wheel as it turns; the croupier even makes the traditional “no more bets” gesture at the beginning of each spin. The dice games give you a felt-level view of the dice as they tumble from one end of the table to the other. And you can bet on fictional basketball, football and baseball teams, as well as greyhound and horse races, in the sports and race books. Not to be left out, nine slot machines are also part of the package.
 As in Far East, you begin by creating an avatar who will represent you at all of the tables. You choose your favorite poison from the main menu, then pick a specific game from the resulting submenus. Since each game has its own quirks, tutorials for all of the card games are available in case you need a refresher. You start out with $5,000 in your bankroll and play using Real World odds in the table games, Dream World odds (slightly better payoff) in the slots. In the sports book, you choose a sport and the type of bet you want to make (straight, teasers or parlays). And in the race book, you have five minutes to place single race, exacta and trifecta wagers on horse and dog races before post time. You even get to watch the animals rush around the track from a top-down perspective, complete with a bugle call to bring them to the starting line.
The overall object of Imperial Fortune is to work your way through the various games in pursuit of a berth in the Grand Master Tournament. The first step is to complete challenges in selected games. Then you move on to playing for trophies against AI challengers, then to Cup tournaments, and finally to the last step, an opportunity to become a Grand Master. Some of the initial challenges are simple, others more demanding, but almost all of them are totally dependent on the luck of the draw. The number of decks in the card shoes is never disclosed, so counting cards is impossible, and your virtual opponents seem to be fairly good players. Card-playing veterans should find some challenging gameplay, while the added help of the tutorials makes the games accessible for newcomers.
 One thing that Phantom’s casino games have in common is a surprisingly high-quality visual presentation, and Imperial Fortune is no exception. From the stylish opening credit sequence to the re-creations of the various gaming tables, there’s lots of eye candy on display, and it should all run very well on practically anyone’s rig. However, there are some design flaws. The graphics on the craps tables are detailed to the point of being confusing, which is bad considering that the tutorials are limited to the card games in the collection. The sports book graphics are stark and drab, and the layout of the screens is easily the least attractive in the game, as opposed to the imagination and creativity that went into creating the race book interface. Also, just like in real casinos, dealers always have the annoying knack of dealing themselves just the cards they need to beat you, no matter how good your hands might be. The buy-in for all of the trophy tournaments in the game is $5,000, which means it’ll likely take you a really long time to have the funds to move onward on the Grand Master tournament path. And in some of the games, the AI characters are much too conservative; in one hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, all seven of my virtual opponents folded even before the first face-up card was revealed, leaving me with the princely sum of $1.75 in winnings. There’s also an online component to the Reel Deal family of games, called Reel Deal Live. It sounded like fun until I tried to access it; after almost 30 minutes worth of patches were applied to the client, a missing object prevented me from connecting to the service, and support on the Phantom home page is non-existent.
I’ve never been very good at casino card games, as evidenced by the $3,500 of virtual cash that I lost by the time I finished the grand tour of Reel Deal Casino: Imperial Fortune. But the wide variety of games in the package and its impressive graphical detail almost managed to hook me. If it wasn’t for the difficulty involved with the tournament setup, the eerie and almost enraging luck that the dealers seem to enjoy, and the second-rate design of the sports book option, I might still be putting up $25 chips on the blackjack table, looking for the A-K 21 I need to get into the next tournament round.
Our Score: 
Our Recommendation: 
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We recently purchased the Rell Deal Casino – Imperial Fortune. On the table games, the card are all blank (poker, blackjack, et.) Is there a way to fix this?
Linda:
First thing you should try is to uninstall and reinstall the game. Next, try going into the game’s options menu and changing all of your graphics settings to their minimums. If that doesn’t work, go to the game’s official website and post a question on their Online Support forum (http://boards.phantomefx.com/forumdisplay.php?f=18). If the community can’t help you, go to the site’s support center and open a support ticket (http://support.phantomefx.com/helpdesk/supportcenter/). I’ve never dealt with them, so I don’t know how easy it is to get information from them. Hope that helps! Good luck.
Don’t waste your money on this game..the dreamworld payouts are a joke….
I’ve played Samurai 800 spins..one day 200…zero bonus rounds…..two days later played 400 spins hit for one bonus round where middle samurai is wild,won practically nothing ….just played 200 spins today and hit one bonus 8 free spins…hit a wild spot once on the 8 free spins.
The day I played 400 spins I lost a million in dreamworld…..very agitating to say the least.
re carribean poker. I think there is an error in the payoff softwear. When the dealer qualifies and the player has a pair , the player is only getting paid on his ante and not on his 2x bet.
How do I uninstall this software from my computer? I tried the uninstall program and didn’t get anywhere.
Try going to the Windows Control Panel and selecting Programs and Features (if you’re using Windows 7; there’s a similarly titled application in XP/Vista). Find Reel Deal Casino in the list of installed programs, right-click it and select uninstall. And if that doesn’t work, you’ll have to go to the directory where you installed the game (usually c:/program files/) and delete the folder manually. It probably won’t be totally removed from your system, but you’ll get most of it that way.
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