Pillars of Asgard Slot – Free Demo

Six reels that only grow when Odin says so

Industry giants Light & Wonder take a turn for the mythical in Pillars of Asgard, and as the name implies, players take a journey up above the earth’s crust to the abode of the Norse gods. Wins begin on the leftmost reel and run across consecutive reels, and each symbol can only be used once in a combination. Those who are somewhat queasy have nothing to fret about, because the entire mood is more majestic than bleak. The wild is Odin’s helm and the scatter is the blue gem crown. The game itself is more aspiring. The one feature is the Reel Rise Feature, a free games round that adds rows to the reel window as it goes. It comprises a 6 reel, 4,096-ways layout with ample space to expand. There is also a Buy Pass, which skips the base game and triggers the Reel Rise Feature for 80x the total bet.

Light & Wonder has founded the game loosely around Odin. His name is attached to two of the bonuses inside the free games, the Odin’s Blessing Bonus and the Rise of Odin Bonus. He is the all-father who featured in a host of sagas, poems, and movies, and if you are ignorant of the god, it’s no surprise, since the source material was recorded way back in the 13th century. It was seemingly quite a smash then. Why Light & Wonder has resurrected the character or the epoch is a bit of a puzzle, though it’s a fine pick, because the theme of the game is rather singular, set as it is in Asgard.

4,096 ways at 25 coins

In the middle of the picture is the 6x4 game grid with 4,096 ways to win. It takes 25 coins to play those ways, and every win is multiplied by the coin value. When it comes to symbols, only combinations of three of a kind or more are feasible. The gold eagle heads the standard symbols, followed by the purple valknut, the blue triple horn and the green spear, with A, K, diamond, J, 10 and Y beneath them. The wild is the most lucrative at 25,000 coins for six of a kind, which works out at 1,000 times the total bet. Six consecutive wilds pay that award on its own, and nothing else is added to it.

Don’t neglect to pay the toll before you cross the rainbow bridge - which is a roundabout way of leading into bet selection. Coinciding wins are added together, so a spin can pay several ways at once. My own testing ran at a total bet of 3.00 a pop. Over 420 spins that came to 1,260.00 wagered and 1,446.60 won. The rules are worth reading before setting off, then, because the figure it prints is 96.104% RTP. Always pays to verify of course. Any win can also be gambled once, with red or black doubling it and a correct suit quadrupling it.

Every wild on screen raises the floor

Wilds are crucial in Pillars of Asgard, and the wild can substitute for any of the standard pay symbols to create a winning combination. The scatter is the only symbol it will not stand in for. Any win a substituting wild is part of is randomly multiplied by x2 up to x10. Every wild on screen counts towards the range, whether or not it takes part in the win. The nice thing is that more wilds on screen lift the floor of that band. Two wilds set the floor at x3, three at x4, four at x5 and five at x6. So with six wilds in view the multiplier is either x8 or x10, and six-of-a-kind wild wins are not multiplied. One captured frame shows the ladder above the reels resolving on x6, with two Odin’s helm wilds on reels five and six and a two way win paying 180.00 at a 3.00 total bet.

Minty Slots Verdict: 420 spins turned one Reel Rise Feature, a plain 20-game trigger that paid 93 times the stake and 19% of everything the session won; the rest arrived in ones and twos off the wild multipliers, with 61 of the 114 paying spins returning less than the 3.00 stake.

Twenty free games, ten positions a reel

Next up is the scatter symbol which can drop in any spot. Landing 3 or more of them in view triggers the Reel Rise Feature. A bought feature runs a spin that guarantees at least three scatters, though no trigger win is paid on it. It arrives with 20 free games and appends rows according to the trigger:

• 3 scatters append 1 row, for 15,625 ways.
• 4 scatters append 2 rows, for 46,656 ways.
• 5 scatters append 3 rows, for 117,649 ways.
• 6 scatters append 4 rows, for 262,144 ways.

Entry to the free spins feature comes with 20 games. The round is played at the coin value of the game that triggered it. It cannot be retriggered, and during this round, every scatter that drops lifts its own reel by one spot, up to a maximum of 10. The Buy Pass is locked out for the duration of the feature. Any reel that attains 10 spots triggers the Odin’s Blessing Bonus. Wins on that spin are paid once, after the scatters on the reel have turned wild. That converts its scatters into wilds for the remainder of the feature and appends 5 more free games, so a round runs to 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 or 50. Each of those steps costs one reel reaching its ceiling of 10 positions. Get all six reels to 10 and the Rise of Odin Bonus releases 1,000,000 ways along with a Floating Wild Stack blanketing a random full reel each free game. The stack covers all 10 positions on its reel, moves to a new reel at the start of each following free game, and counts as one wild when the multiplier range is worked out.

420 spins for one Reel Rise

Despite the recognisable format, Pillars of Asgard is quite a novel game to play, and what renders it so is the expanding grid, as well as the ways count rising with it. Reels only grow inside the feature; the base game keeps its four positions per reel. It certainly makes a pleasant change to visit somewhere unfamiliar. Raging Rhino Rampage is another six-reel, 4,096-ways game from Light & Wonder, while Spartacus Megaways is the studio’s other six-reel title that climbs as high as 1,000,000 ways. Even if that means ascending all the way to the gods, the more you think about it, the odder the game actually becomes. It appears the reels themselves are what Odin is blessing here, so what could he desire with them?

It’s improbable I’ll ever find out. If the Buy Pass looks steep, Chance will open it at a lower price in steps of 10x the total bet up to 70x, with the odds of it working scaling to the price paid. The gameplay is brisk, and straightforward, with added depth supplied by the Reel Rise Feature’s stack of enhancements.

Should enough of them emerge, wild multipliers can be just as decisive with the chance of x10 on the win. In my session the bonus money accounted for 19% of everything won. The max win potential of up to 1,000 times the stake is a modest figure.

Having said that, it's difficult to see how one could even come close to that figure. It wants six wilds landing consecutively from the leftmost reel. Across 420 spins the game returned 114.8%, with the balance shifting from 1,000.00 to 1,186.60. It peaked at 1,471.90 on spin 101 and dipped as low as 995.20. Only 114 spins paid at all, 61 of those for less than the stake. The longest run without a win was 15 spins, ending on spin 281. It's all about the wild multipliers here. The multiplier lands once per winning combination, revealed after the reels have settled. Respectable wins need reels rising early combined with heaps of wilds or high pays, and the one Reel Rise Feature I witnessed showed up on spin 100. It ran its 20 games without a retrigger and paid 279.00, or 93 times the stake, which was the best result of the session.