Can't paginate with query_posts

I’m altering the loop on a template page so it shows a custom post type. Great, working fine.

What’s not working is the pagination of the entries. Before you say it, I’ve thoroughly googled this and the common answer is:

$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

I’ve tried this every which way, here’s the start to my loop:

$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts( 'post_type=promotions&posts_per_page=6&offset=1&paged=' . $page);
if (have_posts()) :
  while (have_posts()) : the_post();

Still doesn’t work!

It seems to be aware of page counts, and when clicking to page 2, the url, even the title change. But the entries are still the first 6.

What’s my problem? Is there something else I should be looking at that might over ride this when I use query_posts (it paginates regular posts just fine without).

Thanks