Spin And Spell Slot – Free Demo

The Vamp, the Castle and the jar of eyeballs

Spin and Spell places the reels into a witch's laboratory, with a Vamp, a Castle, and a jar of eyeballs for company. Three witch symbols sit at the top of the standard paytable, above the bat and the black cat.

Players must first settle how much they would like to stake, before watching the spells go off around the grid. There is no Ante bet to switch on, so the stake is the only setting that changes a round.

Where the paytable puts the witches

Each base game round sees symbols land on a 5x3 grid with 20 fixed paylines. The Castle is the one symbol that does not need a line, since it counts anywhere on the display. Wins are formed from left to right, and the Vamp is the wild and stands in for everything except the Scatter. That exception only bites on the trigger, and in the base game the Vamp stays in its single cell and fills gaps on a line. For five of a kind it awards 1000 coins per line, while the Castle is the Scatter and awards 2, 10, or 100 coins for three, four, or five. Across 280 spins at a 2.00 stake, 83 spins paid something, and 46 of those returned less than the stake.

Three Castles deal ten spins

Spin and Spell deals in free spins, expanding wilds, and the gamble round. The three are chained together: Scatters start the round, the expanding wild exists only inside it, and the gamble sits on top of any win from either.

Landing 3, 4 or 5 Scatters anywhere triggers 10 free spins, and extra free spins can be won inside the round. Three, four and five Scatters all deal the same 10 spins, so the extra Castles add their scatter win and nothing to the count.

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A wild that fills a reel and then goes

A Wild occupies its reel across all 3 positions, during free spins only. One Vamp landing anywhere on a reel is enough to fill that reel top to bottom. The next spin removes the expanded wild. Nothing carries from one free spin to the next, so each one is built from whatever wilds land on it.

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The eyeball that will not pop

Any win can be carried into a gamble round. It is offered on wins from the base game and from the free spins alike. There the task is to guess the eyeball that will not pop.

Two triggers in 280 spins

When the entire feature list runs to three items, you know a five-reel game constructed around a witch, a Vamp, and a castle is keeping things basic. In 280 spins the trigger arrived twice, on spin 226 and again on spin 254. Spin and Spell is on solid, well-known ground. The second round came 28 spins after the first and paid 54.00, against the 0.80 the base game paid on the trigger spin itself. It sees the return of scatters, free spins, and a gamble round, with no additional features besides. No multiplier is attached to the free spins, so the round pays at the same rates the base game does.

Our Minty Verdict: The feature adds exactly one thing to this reel set, a wild that fills its reel for a single spin and is cleared by the next one, and across 280 spins it came out twice. Everything else is a base game in which 46 of the 83 paying spins came in under the stake, and that is where a run of this game actually spends its money.

Where it sits on the BGaming shelf

Fans of BGaming's back catalogue should be familiar with a lot of the gameplay to be discovered in Spin and Spell, where the core of the experience stays lining up symbols from left to right, pursuing castles, and hoping for a wild to spread out. The longest the logged run went without a win was 14 spins, ending on spin 84. Free spins largely just bring the expanding wild to the show. Between them the two rounds paid 86.00, a quarter of everything the session won. The gamble is a fairly simple pick-and-hope affair. It is optional on every win, so a round can be closed out the moment the reels stop.

It's tough to criticise Spin and Spell for what it is, even if it isn't the evolutionary jump some may have been hoping for. The best single spin of the session, 54.80 on spin 254, came to 27.4 times the 2.00 stake. Watching wilds spread across a reel while the free spins tick down is as pleasing as the format permits.