Crystal Clans

What is Crystal Clans?

Arjan Blok, CEO of Nederlandse Loterij, emphasised the importance of player protection in a statement this week.

“Skyhills uses devious advertising, including on TikTok, explicitly targeting Dutch players, especially young people. Players there gamble without any safeguards and face all associated risks,” he said. 

“This is unacceptable. It is encouraging to see Skyhills go offline immediately after our initial action.”

What is Crystal Clans?

That line got repeated as part of “Wizard 2.0,” with most media outlets assuming it was to be among the production’s new effects.

Our suspicion is that Dolan was referring to an immersive video simulator—likely intended for the lobby before the movie begins.

Either way, the idea was apparently delayed or scrapped.

What is Crystal Clans?

“For a hundred years this game lived on the corner,” he said in TCS/JOHNHUXLEY’s press release. “Now it’s got a dealer, a pay table and a seat at the table in a real casino. Same dice, new floor.”

Cee-lo—derived from sì wǔ liù (Chinese for “four-five-six”)—is played with three six-sided dice. Popular among Chinese-American players as early as 1893, it was adopted by hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and became a fixture on the street corners of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jadakiss all referenced the game in their music. Kool G Rap called his 1995 album 4,5,6, and its title track included the line “Headcrack, time to get the bread”—the lyric that most likely inspired 50 Cent’s casino adaptation.

But it was Thomas DeCarlo Callaway who gave the game its biggest mainstream exposure, and gesture of love, when he took his stage name, CeeLo Green, directly from it.