UNLV students develop new skill-based game

Two 20-year-old students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas generated good publicity for their game developing efforts at the recent G2E show in Las Vegas, showcasing their innovative Line em Up social casino app, which they claim may soon appear as part of the drive toward skill games in land casinos.

Troy Pettie and Evan Thomas founded Guru Games to further their developer ambitions, and revealed that they are currently negotiating with a hardware distributor to get Line em Up into a land-based casino.

Line em Up was inspired by massively popular games like Bejewelled and Candy Crush, but it is powered by the duo’s own patent-pending algorithm, challenging players to use the best strategy to create as many vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines of matching icons as possible.

Demonstrating the new game, Thomas told the Las Vegas Review Journal that he and Pettie had studied what made games like Bejewelled and Candy Crush so popular, and they had then blended these elements with their knowledge of traditional gambling games and slot machines to create something original and entertaining.

The reaction and engagement of the crowds at G2E appeared to validate those claims as spectators became enthusiastically involved in the demonstrations.

The Guru Games co-founders claim that their mathematical model meets all Nevada gaming regulations and guarantees that the house always has an edge of 3.5 percent for the players using the best strategy. For others, the house edge drops to about 6 percent.

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