Casino games
How to play slots
Pick a stake and press spin. That is the entire game, and everything else on the screen is decoration around a random number generator.
The decisions that matter happen before the first spin: which title, what stake, and how long you intend to sit there.
What the info panel tells you
Every licensed slot carries a panel with the return rate, the maximum win as a stake multiple, and the paytable. It is usually behind an i button or a burger menu in the corner.
Return rate is the long-run share of stakes paid back, and most modern titles land between 94% and 97%. Studios license several builds of the same game at different rates, so check the panel in the app you are in rather than a number from a review.
Volatility is the thing you actually feel
Two games with identical return rates play completely differently. A low volatility title pays small and often. A high volatility one pays almost nothing for two hundred spins and then does something dramatic.
Neither is better value. High volatility just needs a much bigger balance to survive long enough for the maths to show up, which is why C$0.20 is the sensible stake on one and C$2 is fine on the other.
Before spin one
Set the stake deliberately rather than accepting the default, which is often several notches above the minimum. Turn off auto-play, or if you use it, set both the spin count and the loss limit.
Turn off quick spin. It exists to compress the time between decisions and it works: our own load-time testing across 306 titles puts a phone at roughly two hundred spins in twenty minutes with it on.
Picking a title
Our games board sorts 306 titles on how they behave on a handset rather than on how they look: portrait or a forced rotation, seconds to first tap, and whether the buttons are big enough to use with a thumb.
That last one sounds trivial until you mis-tap a stake selector at speed.