What are paylines and ways to win?
The very first mechanical slot machines featured three revolving reels and just a single payline, where lining up three matching symbols awards a prize – the first ‘way to win’.
Nowadays, the addition of more reels and rows has created more potential winning combinations, with paylines coming in various patterns. Meanwhile, in ‘ways to win’ slots, the paylines aren’t fixed, so matching symbols can just appear on consecutive reels, rather than lining up in a specific pattern. Then there are pays anywhere and cluster pay slots where symbols simply need to appear anywhere on the grid, or in a group, to award a prize.
While the way symbol combinations need to land may vary from slot to slot, what most classic reel games tend to share is a fixed number of rows – that is to say that the number of symbols that can land on each reel and across the entire grid is the same on any spin, and so are the possible ways to win. So, how about with Megaways™ games and what makes them so… Mega?!
Megaways™ vs paylines
With the development of Megaways™, Big Time Gaming took the idea of fixed rows and grid configurations and broke the mould.
While the number of reels that appear in a Megaways™ slot stays the same throughout, the reels are designed to be dynamic, carrying symbols of varying sizes. It means that the number of symbols that can appear on each reel differs on every spin, which in turn changes the potential number of winning combinations.
As with classic ways to win slots, wins come by way of landing matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left, but the changeable reel structure and randomised paylines of Megaways™’ make every spin unique.
In classic Megaways™ titles, the mechanic varies the number of symbol positions on five reels from two up to seven, which creates up to a potential 117,649 ways to win on every spin.
Different configurations diversify the experience and elevate the max ways even higher, from featuring an extra horizonal reel on top of the reels to upping the maximum number of symbols per row to eight.
Pragmatic Play Megaways™ games
Here are just some top titles to look out for: