CasinoVerse

Some time in the years before his death in 1913, the Mexico City printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched a grinning female skeleton wearing a wide hat loaded with feathers. He called her La Calavera Garbancera. She was a joke at the expense of people who dressed up as Europeans and looked down on their own roots. More than a century later, a version of her face, painted white with flowers around the eyes, is one of the most recognised images on Day of the Dead themed slots, including Pragmatic Play's Muertos Multiplier Megaways. Very little of how she got there is what most people assume. A satire, not an ancient goddess The most common myth about the elegant skeleton now called La Catrina is that she is an Aztec deity carried forward intact. She is not. She is a twentieth century cartoon. Posada worked for the popular presses of Mexico City, producing cheap broadsheets with verses and images for ordinary readers. His calaveras, skeletons doing the things living people do, were...

Valley of the Kings, Egypt, November 1922. Howard Carter's workers uncover a step cut into the rock, then a staircase, then a sealed doorway carrying the name of Tutankhamun, a minor king who had died young more than three thousand years earlier. Within weeks, the tomb was one of the most reported archaeological finds in the world. A century later, its imagery still sits on slot reels: the gold mask, the sarcophagus, the scarab, and a book that the ancient Egyptians never actually called a book. A tomb that became a news event The facts of the discovery are well documented. Carter, working for his patron George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, found the entrance to tomb KV62 in early November 1922. On 26 November, Carter and Carnarvon looked into the antechamber by candlelight. The most quoted line from that evening, "wonderful things", comes from the account Carter published afterwards; notes written closer to the moment record the exchange in slightly different ...