Online Slots

Nobody really chooses a slot. You open one, wait for the bonus round, decide in about ninety seconds whether it was worth the trip, and do it again twenty minutes later. It works. It is also the slowest way anyone has found to end up with four games they like.

There is a quicker route, and it has two moves in it. Learn half a dozen studio names. Learn what a volatility rating is telling you.

Theme, reel count and the name stamped on the bonus round are decoration. Those two moves cut more than 1,800 slots from over fifty studios down to a list you can work through in an evening.

Which studio does what

Spinomenal and Red Tiger are the two largest presences here, and they are nothing alike. Red Tiger is bright, quick and heavily themed, built from a set of house features that keep coming round; you will recognise the second game you open. Spinomenal is harder to pick out of a line-up.

The split that matters more is what a house does with its volatility. That is a decision somebody took once and has stuck to since, and it holds wherever you happen to be reading this.

Pragmatic Play, Red Tiger and NetEnt build at the top of the scale — plain spins, with the features saved up for the bonus round. Synot hardly goes there at all. Eyecon and Blueprint Gaming are the next steadiest, and Hacksaw Gaming, Spinomenal and ELK sit in the middle, committed to neither.

So if a Pragmatic game has ever left you cold, the theme was probably not the problem.

Pragmatic Play's grid games run on the tumble: symbols that have just paid come off the grid, new ones drop into the gap, and one paid spin can pay two or three times before it settles. Their version is still the loudest one going.

Sweet Bonanza 1000 is written up here, if you would rather read the mechanics than discover them.

Hacksaw Gaming runs on a different instinct. Its games are stripped back, thin on decoration, and built around a single idea played hard. When a Hacksaw game works it is because the idea was good. When it does not, there is nothing else in there to enjoy.

Smaller studios play to smaller rooms, and that is where the odder ideas turn up: a mechanic nobody else is using, a format that should not work and does. They are smaller. Some of them are better.

Reading a volatility rating

Every slot here carries a volatility rating. On a game you have never opened, that rating is the most honest thing about it. It says nothing about the outcome of a spin. What it describes is where a game keeps its features: spread through the ordinary spins, or held for the bonus round.

The band worth learning is the middle. Medium and medium-high is where a bonus round is part of a session instead of the entire point of it, and there is a lot of it about. No preference yet? Start there and work outward until something annoys you.

A lean is not a rule, either. Pragmatic has games down at the quiet end, Synot has a few at the loud one, and the rating that counts is the one on the game in front of you.

Before you open one

Two questions before you open anything: who made it, and what it is rated.

The third thing, when you want one, is what the bonus round actually does: free spins, a tumbling grid, multipliers adding up across a round. Those are not interchangeable, and the difference is usually why one game holds you for an hour and another gets shut after ten spins.

None of it is a system. It gets you from more than 1,800 down to five or six worth opening, which is the whole job.

Not everyone gets on with reels, mind. There are far fewer casual games, if fewer is what you want. And if you need an account before any of it, the welcome offer and its terms live on the bonuses page.