In terms of popularity, Slots are one of the most played games in casinos these days. They’ve been around since the late 1800s and have found major success with their relatively simple gameplay.
But there’s a lot more to slot games than just pressing a button, tapping a screen or pulling a lever to get the reels spinning. Quite a bit goes on behind the scenes of a slot machine, more than you might imagine.
That’s why we’ve put together our quick and simple guide to Slots, so read on to learn more about how these games work and the sorts of gameplay you might find in casino slots in the UK.
The mechanics of slot machines
There’s plenty going on beneath the hood of slot machines, even after the move away from mechanical cabinets to video Slots and online play. While the spinning reels have gone from physical to digital, a lot still goes into making sure that they work the way that they do.
The piece of tech that keeps slot games running smoothly is known as a random number generator (RNG). This does exactly what it says on the tin, with the advanced computer algorithm producing hundreds of random numbers per second.
Each of these numbers corresponds to a single symbol on each of the reels, which allows the RNG to determine the outcome of every spin. Once a player initiates a game the computer takes the set of numbers generated at that moment as the basis of the spin’s outcome.
This is how slot games remain fair, with the results of each individual spin entirely down to the random nature of the RNG.
The major types of Slots
Over time, developers have found new ways to innovate on the classic Slots formula, leading to the creation of many new types of slot games. These days they’re split into a few major categories based on a few key features and gameplay mechanics.
One major division is made depending on the type of jackpot that the game offers, with some Slots using a fixed jackpot amount and others a progressive one.
What this means is that each time that game – or one of a linked network – is played, a small amount of the player’s wager goes towards the jackpot total. This allows the figure to climb far higher, potentially hitting five or six digits before a jackpot combination lands.
Another difference comes in the amount of paylines that a slot game uses, or whether it even has any at all. The payline is the row of connecting symbols that the game checks for winning combinations, from horizontal and diagonal lines to zigzags and other patterns.
Classic Slots will often only use a couple of paylines, where others have hundreds of possible lines for players to activate depending on the amount of their wager. Games using the Megaways format don’t have traditional paylines, instead basing combinations on whether symbols appear in clusters.
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There’s still plenty more to learn about the ins and outs of Slots, but this should have given you a good basic understanding of the games.
