Gold Vault Roulette from Evolution

Welcome to Gold Vault Roulette from Evolution. You may recognise the set.

Gold Vault Roulette is actually Gold Bar Roulette mark 2. Gold Bar was launched a year earlier amid considerable fanfare and expectation. Along with a very decadent and expensive set, came the concept of accumulating gold bars that could be bet in future rounds. In a rare miss for Evolution, the reception from players fell short of expectations so it was back to the drawing board.

Enter Gold Vault Roulette. It comes with the exact same set (understandably, they want to recoup the big investment cost, and it does look great), and the same gold bar reveal from the vault after bets close.

But Gold Vault Roulette simplifies things quite a bit from its predecessor. It’s now a simple roulette game with random multipliers applied each round.

How to Play Gold Vault Roulette

Here’s your Gold Vault Roulette nutshell explanation.

Each round, after bets close, 5-20 gold bars are revealed and allocated randomly to Straight Up bets. Each gold bar ups the payout of that number to 50x. Occasionally a purple coloured gold bar can make an appearance, upping one of the Straight Up bet payouts to 500x.

Only Straight Up bets are impacted by the gold bar multipliers. What’s more, the default payout for Straight Up wins is 24:1 (rather than the regular 35:1).

The mechanics of the game is straight forward.

After ample time to get your bets on, bets will close and the croupier will manually launch the ball.

It’s then over the vault to reveal how many gold bars (5 to 20) will be applied.

In the below round it was 10 – all gold with no sign of the elusive purple bar.

Those 10 bars, each worth 50x, are randomly applied to numbers on the table. In the example round:

• 8 numbers had their payout upsized to 50x,
• 1 number (number 1 actually) was ‘double gold barred’ for a 100x payout (3 bars and 150x is the max for any number).

32 Red was the winning number. 32 Red also happened to have a gold bar applied for a 50x payout on a Straight Up bet.

While we had half a chip on 32 (32/35 Split from a Jeu Zero bet), because it was a Split bet, not a Straight Up bet, the regular 17:1 Split payout applied.

Which does beg the question – why not bet Straight Up for a chance at the gold bar multiplied payout? One good reason – the returns applying to this bet just aren’t as good, which brings us to…

Theoretical Returns

Gold Vault Roulette’s return to player (RTP), as published in the game’s house rules:

• on Straight Up bets: 97.03%
• on all other bets: 97.30%

The return on all other bets mirrors the RTP of European Roulette. Same bets and payouts. The RTP on the altered Straight Up bet falls slightly short.

It’s fair to say in this case the difference is marginal. Often the tricked up bet option offering the possibility of big payouts will return substantially less.