Featured Games
There are six thousand games and more on Swift now, and most people who come in will only ever see the top of the lobby, which we know full well, since we do the very same thing on every other app on our own phones. You open it on the bus home, have a flick down a screen or two, and end up on the slot you played on Sunday, and the rest of them go on sitting there for months without anybody opening them. So we keep a short shelf at the front of the lobby for a few of them. That is this page. It is a handful of games we went and pulled forward so they would get a look in, and the handful does not stay the same for long.
This week, as it happens, it is one studio
When we were writing this up the first three tiles on the shelf were 4 Hat Riches Burst, Phoenix Kingdom Extra Burst and Dinero N Oro Super Bonus, and all three of them are Wizard Games slots. We did not plan a Wizard week or anything like it, the studio just put a few releases out close together and they all came in around the same time. By the time you get round to reading this some of them will probably have moved along.
If you have not played them yet, the two Burst games have five reels, three rows and forty paylines, and the bit everybody is waiting on is the Hold N Spin round. You need enough of the coin symbols to land, they lock where they are, you get a few respins, and every new coin that comes down sticks there with the others and puts the respins back to full again. Phoenix Kingdom Extra Burst gives some of its coins extra jobs while that is going on, multiplying or collecting or doubling the values already sat on the reels, and most of the drama in that game comes out of those few spins. Dinero N Oro has a whole different look to it but it comes from the same people, so if you got on with one of them the other two will not take you long to figure out.
We are not saying play those three over anything else, mind you. It will be some other studio’s games up there next month and we will be going on about them instead.
How a game ends up here in the first place
Mostly the shelf is new releases. When a new slot comes into a lobby this big it goes in down around tile four hundred or so, and down there a game can sit for a year with hardly anybody opening it. Every so often we put an older one up as well, one that did not get much of a go the first time round and that people only seem to find by accident. There are more than fifty studios sending us games and they all put them out whenever it suits them, so some weeks the shelf is mostly the one studio, like now, and other weeks it is all sorts.
We do not mind it being a bit lopsided like that. If the same half dozen games sat up there from one Christmas to the next you would stop seeing them after a couple of weeks, same as with anything you walk past every day.
Before you press anything, have a go at the Info button
Every tile has a Play Now button and an Info button, and most people go for Play Now without a second look. The Info one opens the game up so you can see what it is before you spend anything, and once you are inside a slot there is a paytable and a rules page behind the little menu icon. Hardly anybody reads them, we know, but it is all in there.
Have a look for the RTP on there first, the return to player. It is worked out over millions and millions of spins by everybody who plays the game, and people get caught out by it on account of thinking it says something about their own night, when it does not really. Say a game has ninety six percent on it. You could put ten pounds in tonight and have nothing left after twenty minutes, or finish a few pounds up, and both of those can happen on the same game on the same evening to two different people. The ninety six is what it all comes out at over the whole life of the game with every player added together. We made that figure up for the example, but they all work like that.
Then the volatility, which honestly tells you more about how the next hour is going to go than the RTP does. The low ones pay little bits fairly often and your balance just sort of wobbles about. With the high ones you can go ages on next to nothing and then get a big win out of nowhere, or never get it, and a lot of people only work out that they picked a high one after forty spins of nothing much. Some studios put the volatility on the screen for you. Plenty do not, and then you have to go by the paytable your own self, and if the top prize is huge and the normal wins look small, it is a high one more often than not.
It is worth checking what sets the bonus round off as well. On some games it turns up quite often and pays a bit, and on others you need a certain set of symbols that you might see twice in a night or not at all, and if you are playing at ten or twenty pence a spin you will want to know which one you have got before you sit there waiting on it.
The sorts of slot that turn up on the shelf
Hold and spin games like these Wizard ones are all over the place at the minute. People like the respins with the coins locking in, there is a bit more going on than with a normal spin, and most of them are somewhere in the middle for volatility, but it does change from game to game so check it on the Info before you get going.
Megaways games are on the shelf now and then too. Each reel shows a different number of symbols every spin so the number of ways to win keeps changing, and on the big spins it goes over a hundred thousand, which sounds like a lot but mostly it just means there is a lot on the screen. Quite a few of them have cascades as well, the winning symbols disappear and new ones drop down into the gaps, so the one spin can pay two or three times over before it stops.
Cluster pays games do away with paylines and pay you when enough of the same symbol are touching each other on the grid. Jackpot slots have a prize pot as well as the normal game, and it is either a progressive that keeps on going up while people play until somebody wins it, or a fixed one that is the same amount all the time, and we have them all on a separate Jackpots page. And then the three reel classics with their fruit and bars and sevens, which get featured less often, not on account of anybody going off them but because studios do not release many new ones.
The rules that apply to every slot here, featured or not
Swift Casino is licensed in Great Britain by the UK Gambling Commission under account number 39326. A lot of what a slot can and cannot do here is down to the Commission rather than us or whoever made the game, and you can see it in how the games play.
A spin cannot be quicker than two and a half seconds. Autoplay is not allowed, so every spin is one you pressed. The game is not permitted to go off with bells and flashing lights when what you won back is less than what you put in. And online slots carry a maximum stake per spin, five pounds a spin if you are twenty five or older, two pounds a spin if you are between eighteen and twenty four, and that limit covers every tile on this shelf and everywhere else in the lobby regardless of what a game’s own bet menu would let you pick.
Every game has to be checked by an independent test house the Commission has approved before we are allowed to put it live, and they are the ones who make sure the random number generator is actually random and the game pays back what it says. We have no hand in the maths. Neither does where a game sits on this page.
The part where featured does nothing for your chances
People do get this one wrong a lot, so we will just say it. A game being up on the shelf does not mean it pays more. The RTP gets set when the game is made and certified, and it is the exact same whether the game is right at the front here or a few hundred games further down the lobby.
Nor is it a hot tip. A slot cannot be due, it cannot be warming up, and it is not the least bit aware of what happened on the last spin or the last hundred, each spin stands on its own. And there is no guarantee you will get on with it. You might love one of them. The next you might shut again before the kettle has boiled, which is grand, there is an enormous lobby behind it. What the shelf does is put the game in front of you so the decision is yours to make and not one that got made for you by the game being out of sight.
Playing them on your phone
Most of you reading this are on a phone, going by what we see, so the shelf and the games behind it run in the browser on iPhone and Android with nothing to install. If you would rather have it as an icon on the home screen, the Swift Casino app is on Google Play and the App Store and the featured shelf comes along with it. A small tip, turn the phone on its side for the busier games. Megaways reels in portrait on a small screen are hard work.
If the shelf is not your thing this week
Nothing wrong with that at all. If it is fresh releases you are after, the New Games page lists them as they land, and Popular is roughly the opposite, the games that other players keep on going back to. Anybody who would sooner rummage through the lot can go straight to the full online slots lobby.
If you came for something that is not slots, Live Casino has real dealers on real tables. There is a page for online roulette with its various wheels, another for online blackjack, and the big spinning wheel sort of thing lives under Live Game Shows.
Keeping it a pastime
A load of new slots all in one place can turn ten minutes into half the night if you are not careful, so we are putting this here and not down at the bottom in the small print. You have to be eighteen or over to play at Swift Casino. Work out what you are okay to spend before you start, think of it like what you would spend on a night out, and when that is gone just leave it, do not go trying to win it back.
There are tools in your account for this. You can put a deposit limit on, take a time-out if you want a break, or self-exclude if you need to stop for longer, and the Responsible Gaming page goes through how each of them works. If it is not fun anymore you can get free, confidential help from GamStop, GamCare and BeGambleAware, or ring the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, which is open all the time.