If you love playing online slots and want to expand your understanding of the incredible tech behind them, you will enjoy this deep dive into paylines and how the number of ways to win impacts the development of the genre.
When choosing which slot game to play next, much attention is given to its theme, art direction, bonus features, reel layout, and jackpot potential. An often overlooked mechanic that plays a vital role in the construction and playability of a video slot is the ways to win, or paylines, that the developer chooses to apply to the game.
Join us as we delve into paylines, how they work, how to read them, and how they impact the games you enjoy playing.
To win when playing your favourite online slot machine, you will need to string together a set of three or more matching symbols. In the early classic slots, which used a simple 3x3 drum reel, this generally meant that to win the game, you needed to get three matching symbols running left to right on the centre reel.
As video slots moved to the commonly seen 5x3 layout, this gave developers the freedom to become more creative with their ways to win, which led to the creation of paylines which, while they still ran left to right, now boasted a series of up to 50 patterns which could be used to offer players a rewarding outcome from the spins of the reels.
As time went on and developers needed new ways to engage players' interest and make their creation stand out from the crowd, they developed paylines where the matching symbols could need to appear adjacent to one another in straight lines, unique patterns, in numbered groupings, anywhere on adjacent reels, or anywhere on the reels so long as they reached a predetermined number.
This ability to tinker with how winning combinations were defined led to the first big jump in ways to win. The ice hockey-themed casino game Break Away was one of the first titles to offer payers 243 ways to win. It led Big Time Gaming to develop the popular Megaways mechanic, allowing any slot to offer up to 117,649 winning combinations.
Here are the most ways to win that you will find at your favourite online casino and the games that you can play to see them in action for yourself:
These are the most popular payline models available online, and by trying out each of the games we've listed, you will soon have a firm grasp on how they play and which best suits your playstyle.
The number of ways to win that a developer includes on a slot machine does not necessarily correlate with the game's top payout value. When slots feature the Megaways to win mechanic or monstrous pay lines, like in the case of the Million Christmas 2023 slot by Red Rake, which literally boasts 1 million winning combinations, the developer supports the audacity of its pay lines with a big jackpot, but this is a specific game design decision.
If you want to understand the maximum you can win on any casino game, you only need to look at the advertised win multiplier and combine that with the game's max bet setting. For example, a slot offering a top return of up to 1,000x your bet where the max bet is €50 offers a jackpot total of $50,000 per spin.
It is also worth scanning the in-game help file, as some developers offer variables suggesting a maximum payout of several million dollars. Still, in the fine print, they cap any wins per game to a fixed value far less than its theoretical maximum.
The number of available pay lines does not impact the value of a progressive jackpot win or your chances of winning its highest payout.
When a Progressive Jackpot is triggered, it transports the player away from the base game and plays out the deciding mini-game on a custom jackpot screen. The most significant indicator that a progressive jackpot has no direct correlation is that the same jackpot that can be won on a slot machine can sometimes be won on table games.
An excellent example of this crossover is Roulette Mega Moolah, where you can win the world-famous Mega Moolah progressive jackpot while playing a roulette game.
While most online slots follow the tried and true 5 reels and 3 rows layout, modern game design has transformed the popular slot machine into interesting shapes. While some of these decisions are purely aesthetic, there are some instances where this change in the in-game template makes it possible for a developer to expand the available ways to win their slot.
One of the early and very well-known examples of this type of adjustment to the reels to accommodate more paylines is the Bonanza Megaways mining slot.
In order to incorporate Big Time Gaming’s Megaways mechanic, which boosted pay lines to a then-unheard-of 117649 ways to win, the developer added a single four-symbol reel above the base game.
This additional reel was tied into the mining theme of the slot machine by having it act as a trolley system for gems. The developer spun the reel from left to right rather than up and down like the 5x3 base reels to achieve this illusion.
Another feature that was developed almost exclusively to allow for expanded pay lines is the splitting of symbols. Here, developers create a game with a base reel set, and depending on the RNG outcome of the spin, the symbols can be split into any from two up to eight smaller versions of the original, each of which can fulfill its own payline requirement.
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