We are in strange territory when we talk about slots with ten pay lines. Slot gamblers are big on theme variety – heck, slot gamblers are big on variety in every aspect of their machines. 10 line slots are not as popular as more humble designs – traditional machines with a single line (or three lines at the most) have a rabid following, as do the more complex 1,024 Ways machines that eschew pay lines altogether in favor of treating each symbol spot on the screen as something akin to its own pay line.
Ten is a nice number for game designers. Easy to use when calculating wager multipliers, bets-per-line, and other features that slot players like to be able to work out in their head, 10 line slots could be the next big thing in game design. Let’s celebrate the humble ten pay line machine as we look at this math-friendly variant of everyone’s favorite casino machine.
Bejeweled
Produced by Cryptologic, Bejeweled is a five reel game that allows wagers on as many as ten pay lines per spin. Like other ten line games, one of the most attractive features for players at sites that host Bejeweled is its betting range, which allows wagers as low as $0.10 per round and as high as $20 every time the reels are set in motion. That’s because players can lay a wager of a single credit or as many as 200 credits, with credits set at a value of $0.10 each (no variation there) and the option of betting between one and twenty credits on each line. Though high rollers won’t be interested, penny ante bettors and slot fans with bankrolls in the mid-range have plenty of options. One way Bejeweled is lacking is in game features like scatter symbols and bonus rounds; the only extra feature this machine includes is a wild symbol.
Ugga Bugga
Playtech’s ten-liner Ugga Bugga also suffers a little from a lack of extra features; it does use a wild symbol but the extras stop there. Slot players are no doubt used to trading in extra features like bonus rounds and scatters when they play titles with smaller numbers of line, but even traditional games with three reels and a single pay line occasionally have scatter symbols, bonus games, and even a small progressive jackpot from time to time. Credit sizes are on the small end of the scale; players can set credits to be worth anywhere from $0.01 to $5 each. The total available bet variety starts at $0.01 per spin and climbs as high as $250 every round, which makes Ugga Bugga a good fit for low and high rollers alike.
Our Thoughts on 10 Line Games
Let’s hope that this style of game doesn’t up and disappear before we’ve all had time to really dig in and appreciate it. For some reason designers just don’t concentrate on producing machines with ten pay lines. It defies conventional wisdom that far fewer 10 line slots exist than those with just one pay line. After all, bigger is better, right? Slot gamblers deserve credit for embracing traditional games in the year 2013. Maybe a newfound love for the traditional means the end of ten-liner titles.