Megaways slots: what are they and how do they work?

Popular Megaways slots

An overview of slots with Megaways way of playing

How does the player find the slot that suits him or her best? Although slots with Megaways have a number of similarities, there are also enough differences between these slots. Below we have listed a number of striking slots, so that he or she knows exactly what kind of Megaways you can expect.

The Megaways slot with the most paylines is 1 Million Megaways BC, a prehistoric slot where the regular game still has 117,649 paylines, but the player in the bonus has a chance of up to 1,058,841 – that's one million, fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and forty-one paylines. He or she gets an extra role in the bonus game, which makes the possible number of paylines much higher. In addition, 1 Million Megaways BC has a buy-in bonus, which allows him or her to immediately see what it feels like to play with so many paylines.

Some players are just looking for the Megaways slot with the highest RTP . While this may change, of course, Big Time Gaming's White Rabbit slot has been at the top for a number of years, with an impressive RTP of 97.72%. For the Megaways slot with the highest maximum win there are two candidates.

In theory, the player with the Ganesha Fortune slot has the chance to win 1,000,000 x the bet. However, this slot is difficult to find and in a simulation of a billion spins (the usual way to test slots) the maximum win came out to a particularly meager 7524x the bet – very far from that theoretical chance. So he or she is better off with the lock Who Wants to be a Millionaire from Big Time Gaming, where he or she really has a chance of 50,000 x the bet.

The most popular Megaways slot varies by country. In New Zealand, New slots are often just as popular, making it difficult to estimate how long a slot will remain popular. However, Gonzo's Quest Megaways and Piggy Riches Megaways have been popular for some time, while the original Bonanza has been in the top for years.

How exactly does Megaways work?

Megaways is therefore a combination of two mechanisms at once: a different number of symbols on the reel with each spin and using ‘ways-to-win’ instead of classic paylines. Below, we'll take a closer look at those two mechanisms, how they work together, and exactly what the odds of those 117,649 paylines are.

As the player can see, there are now 12 combinations in the picture (2*3*1*2). There are three reasons why more combinations are possible with Megaways: there are more symbols on the reels, there are more reels and symbols often appear stacked on the reels.

Just for the sake of completeness: to ensure that he or she still has the same house edge as a casino, the payments for combinations in a Megaways slot are lower than in many other slots. So he or she is more likely to get a winning combination and even more likely to get a higher win with a lower bet, but over the long run, the casino earns as much from him or her as it does from any other slot.

How likely is it that the player will indeed encounter those magical 117,649 paylines? Although there are Megaways slots with more or less paylines, that number of 117,649 is the most common maximum. To display that number of paylines, he or she needs the maximum configuration: seven symbols on six reels: 7*7*7*7*7*7. The chance of this is very small and below we explain why he or she encounters a smaller number of paylines much more often.

Megaways and dice

To understand how the paylines in a Megaways slot are built, we can easily make a comparison with dice. After all, an ordinary die has six options: 1-6. Each reel in a Megaways slot also has six options: 2-7. If a Megaways slot is completely random, the probability of 117,649 paylines is therefore equal to throwing 36 with six dice.

To understand this possibility, we first look at games with two or three dice. Does the player roll two dice, as in colonists, Monopoly or Craps , then the best chance is that he or she will throw 7. After all, with two dice, he or she has 36 possible outcomes (6*6), of which six outcomes form a 7: a 1+6, 2+5, 3+4 , 4+3, 5+2 and 6+1. In practice, the player does not notice those last three numbers because a 2+5 looks the same as a 5+2, unless he or she plays with different klNZDen dice.

With two dice, there are 36 possibilities. Below we put all these possibilities schematically:

That form remains the same. A well-known three-dice game, Sic Bo, has a total of 216 outcomes: the lowest outcome is 3 and the highest outcome is 18. The most common numbers are 10 and 11. To keep it clear, the table below shows a kind of summary, by putting the ‘mirrored’ outcomes together: