Slots Beginner Guide: The Basic Rules

Playing the Slots is probably one of the easiest games or any newcomer to casinos to get stuck into – it's probably easier than falling off the proverbial log too (though hopefully far more fun!) Players simply place funds into the Slot they want to play, which gives them credit to ‘buy' a number of spins. Activating a spin is done by pushing a button (not quite as much fun as wrestling a large lever like those found on old-school ‘one-armed bandits' of yore, but it gets the job done), following which the player waits for the Slot to complete spinning its reels to reveal the outcome.

Modern Slots games may feature multiple paylines the player can bet on – each payline traverses a different path across the stationary reels to pick out the symbols they can pay out on – which gives more chances to win on each spin, and may have bonus rounds that trigger when a certain sequence appears on a payline in play. For example, the bonus could be a number of free spins, or a chance to play a separate game to generate a ‘multiplier', which multiplies the player's winnings by a certain value.

Other increasingly common features of both real-world and online casino Slots to look out for are ‘Wild' and ‘Scatter' symbols. The former are symbols that can substitute for any other symbol on the reels to help create a winning payline, whilst the latter are symbols that only need to be in view, rather than stopped on a payline to count.