The Greatest Feature in Slots: a Love Letter to Cascading Reels

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I don’t always play slots, but when I do, there’s one mechanic I typically gravitate toward: Cascading Reels. There are a few games I’ve enjoyed that don’t have that feature, but the ones I revisit most frequently almost all have some sort of cascading feature.

There are two reasons I like those features so much. Firstly, I’m of the video game generation and grew up on titles like Tetris, Bust-a-Move and Arkanoid, so chaining together combos is a big dopamine trigger. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it gives time for anticipation to build.

Slots are fast by design, but sometimes they’re a little too fast for my taste. In a traditional slot design, hitting the jackpot takes exactly as long as a losing spin. It’s always nice to win, sure, but with a single-spin design, the game’s already over by the time you get excited. Many contemporary features aim to build and draw out anticipation in an artificial way, for instance by slowing the reels down when you’ve got two of the three Scatter symbols you need to trigger the bonus.

Cascades are a more natural way to draw out anticipation, especially since they’re often tied to other features that ramp up as the combo plays out. Escalating multipliers? Bonus rounds triggered by combos? Accumulating wilds? Add any or all of those things and you’ll likely get a long session out of me.

On the Free Slots page, several of us writing for Bonus got the chance to plug a few of our favorites. You may notice that a couple of them have cascading reels. We only got to dedicate a few words to each of them, though, so I thought I’d take this chance to tell you a bit more about those and some others I’ve discovered more recently.

Xibalba: escalating everything

Let’s start with what’s probably my all-time fave. Xibalba, by Peter & Sons. I love that studio’s quirky aesthetic and innovative mechanics. Here, we’ve got a cartoonish Mayan theme.

You know what I said about other features that ramp up? Xibalba’s got most of them. You start with an all-ways-pay 5×3 grid of carved stone blocks. Get at least three of the same on adjacent reels and you’ll start your cascade. Every match you make does two things: the multiplier goes up and those reels get taller.

None of the symbols pay very much at first. But the taller reels make matches easier and the escalating multiplier makes the prizes bigger. The further you go, the more exciting it gets. Better yet, there are glowing wilds that persist after a match and extend upwards to fill the reels. Get one of those and a big multiplier and you’re really cooking.

Then there are the coins, which can appear on the middle three reels. Get all three and you’ll trigger 15 free spins, during which your multiplier carries over spin-to-spin and wilds are easier to come by. Even more escalation!

But even just two coins does something for you. If your cascade ends with two coins on the reels but not all three, those reels will merge together and you’ll get a respin with oversized blocks. Normally those are 2×2, but if you get coins on the second and fourth reels, the middle reel merges with them as well, and the blocks will be 3×3. At that point, any match you make with a full-sized block will be a minimum of nine lines, times whatever your multiplier is. In short, the prizes can get very big if you get to that point.

Big Bad Wolf Megaways: my original flame

True story: Big Bad Wolf Megaways is the game that convinced me that slots can be fun. I was a poker player who kind of looked down on slots and other games that lack any skill component. However, PokerStars was giving away free spins to promote its casino, which was new at the time. I wasn’t going to say no to free money.

Although Big Bad Wolf Megaways wasn’t part of the free spins, I ended up playing it with some of my winnings to try to run them up into enough to enter a poker tournament. I ended up triggering the feature and winning a few hundred bucks. The rest is history. It’s been years and I still go back to this one now and again.

Many, but not all Megaways games have cascading reels. What makes Big Bad Wolf unique is that cascading combos gradually turn some of the symbols into Wilds: specifically, the Three Little Pigs. There are three colors of pig, which turn Wild one at a time after two, four, and six consecutive matches. That can make things hugely tense when you’re one symbol short of a huge win and you have Pigs on that reel. Then all you have to do is keep the chain going until those Pigs turn Wild. It’s similar if you have two of the three Scatter symbols for the bonus, and have another chance to trigger it with each cascade.

Unlike Xibalba, there are no multipliers in the base game here, but they show up in the bonus feature.

Purrrminator: what’s a ‘reverse’ cascade?

When I saw that Purrrminator by Relax Gaming advertised a “reverse cascade” feature, I knew I had to give it a try, if only to learn what that means.

As it turns out, the concept isn’t hard to grasp. When you get a winning combo, the winning symbols don’t disappear—everything else does. The winning symbols then drop to the bottom, locked up in cages, and new ones fill the grid. It then becomes a bit like a hold-and-spin bonus round, where as long as you keep getting more of those symbols, you can keep the cascade going. Once you don’t get anymore, the cascade stops and you score based on the symbols you’ve collected.

Any line that doesn’t skip a row counts, so piling up more symbols has a multiplying effect. Adding one to one of your shorter columns might double your winnings, and filling in a gap can be worth even more. On top of that, the Wilds are also your Scatters for triggering the bonus. So once you have two of those, every additional cascade is another chance to get a third.

Coins and Cannons: OMG volatility

Highly volatile slots are super exciting when they hit and extremely frustrating when they don’t. Such is the case with Coins and Cannons by Slotmill.

This is a cluster pays slot, which is another mechanic that often goes hand-in-hand with cascades. There are no paylines, you’re just trying to get groups of five or more matching symbols touching each other.

When you make a match, two things happen. First, a new Wild gets added in one of the spaces occupied by the matching symbols. Second, any other identical symbols on the grid that weren’t part of your win also disappear. Both of those things make it a bit easier to trigger a second win and keep the cascade going.

The basic payouts aren’t very big, but the game’s main features both help you get bigger prizes, especially if they occur together. As you may have already guessed those are Coins… and Cannons. Both of these have multipliers, but they mean slightly different things.

Coins are like the regular symbols in that you want to match five of them. However, the prize you get when you do is equal to the sum of their multipliers, times your bet size. So if you’re betting a dollar and match coins that say 1x, 1x, 2x, 3x and 5x, you’ll win $12. Matching coins doesn’t produce a Wild, though. Instead, it merges them all. So in that example you’d end up with a single 12x coin after scoring your win.

Cannons are rarer, but their multiplier applies at the end of your spin to the combined total of all your prizes on that spin. These can go up to 100x, so if you match that same set of coins and also get a 100x cannon, you’re winning $1,200.

It’s hard to retrigger the merged coins during the base gameplay. However, getting three Scatter symbols wins free spins, during which any Coins you get stay on the reels for the next spin. During free spins, it’s a lot easier to retrigger the same coin two or three times and build up a big multiplier. There’s even a Super Bonus which gives guaranteed cannons on every spin.

Taking all those things together, it’s never boring when the cascading starts. Even a lackluster win means another chance for a high-valued cannon to drop in and turn that 2x into 200x. If you want a definition of volatility, just try this game and you’ll understand.