Owls Slot – Free Demo

The owls are the ones asleep

Three Scatters on reels 2, 3 and 4 start Dream Spins, and for the length of that round the centre reel carries a stacked Wild. On the surface Owls might seem a simple woodland slot. The reel strips are not the same in a bonus mode as in the base game. However, in the game realm, the owls are sleepers. I played 430 spins at a 0.60 stake, and 183 of them paid, 108 of those for less than the stake. What occurs when they drop off is the point of the whole affair, so if you ever wished to know what an owl dreams about, Nolimit City has obligingly filled in the blanks. Over those 430 spins I wagered 258.00 and got 217.56 back.

Eleven symbols across fifteen bet lines

The dreaming occurs on a 5-reel, 3-row game grid running 15 bet lines, and onto these reels, eleven symbols emerge. Bet per line is the total bet divided by 15, so at my 0.60 stake each line carried 0.04. They form combos when they land consecutively on neighbouring reels along a bet line. Combinations are counted from the leftmost reel inwards. The largest win per line is paid and multiplied by the bet per line. Wins that coincide on more than one line are all paid. The night-time tinkering unfolds in a woodland strewn with shards, chests, books and swords. The three Owls sit above those in the pay table, with the Ember Owl at the top of the order and the Frost Owl the lowest of the three.

Extra laughs are supplied by the owls themselves, the Frost Owl and the Grove Owl, who appear in the dreams as well as the reels, and there's an old-school flavour to Owls, mostly due to the fixed line count but also due to a similarly stripped-back theme. Nolimit City kept building on fixed lines after this one, with Thor Hammer Time on 20 lines later in 2019 and Book of Shadows running 10, 15 or 20 of them a year after that. My longest run without a win was 11 spins, ending on spin 76.

Out of Nolimit City's lineup of games, Owls has a notably modest max win figure at 458x the bet, and the studio hasn't driven it to extreme levels. My balance never left a band between 9,957.10 at its lowest and 10,006.66 at its peak, which came on spin 171.

When matching symbols land on neighbouring reels along one of the 15 bet lines, winning combinations strike in Owls, and only the largest win on each line is paid. The Scatter is the exception to all of that, working on reel 3 for one feature and on reels 2, 3 and 4 for the other. It is multiplied by the bet per line, which is the entire bet divided by 15. My second-best spin of the session, spin 212, paid 20.0x the stake. One final symbol, for now, is the wild. It substitutes for everything except the Scatter. It also stands in for the highest-paying combination available on the line it lands on.

Scatter Loot and the reel-three stack

The features in Owls have a classic slot flavour to them. Both of them key off the Scatter, so nothing here triggers without one. They sit on the 5-reel game grid, and the extras comprise a scatter pay and the three Dreams. I triggered the Dream Spins round four times in 430 spins.

When a stacked Scatter is entirely visible on reel 3, Scatter Loot pays out, and the central Scatter counts as one instance for every symbol. That is how a five-reel grid can register six or seven of a kind at all. Because wilds participate, 6- and 7-symbol hits are possible. Those two rows of the pay table are reachable nowhere else in the game.

Ember, Emerald or Frozen, five spins each

Landing three Scatters on reels 2, 3 and 4 triggers Dream Spins, and the game randomly grants one of Ember Dream, Frozen Dream or Emerald Dream, 5 spins each. The middle Scatter always nudges into full view as the round is awarded. The centre reel keeps a stacked Wild for the entire feature:

Ember Dream: Flame Shard and Flame Chest turn Wild on every spin.
Emerald Dream: Emerald Shard and Emerald Book turn into Grove Owl on every spin.
Frozen Dream: Frost Owl, Frost Shard and Frost Sword turn into the most frequent Frost symbol on every spin, ties going to the greatest value.

Any Scatter beyond the first three each add an extra spin to the round, with no limit on the total. All four of my rounds ran their five spins and stopped there.

The Minty Take: Four Dream rounds across 430 spins came to 13% of everything I won, and every one of them ended on its fifth spin. The base game paid the other 87%.

Four Dreams across 430 spins

Nolimit City has gathered together elements of classic slot design to create the modest blend that is Owls, in a comparable manner to the slumbering birds of this tale. The bonus is built short: five spins, one transformation rule, a stacked Wild parked on the centre reel. There's the fixed-line link, of course. It is chiefly in regards to structure and visuals, as the feature set is very distinct, and Owls sticks to reels. Each stacked Wild on that centre reel stands for its own Owl. The stacked centre wild supplies a snowball element, but it does not produce the same protracted win sequences as in the studio's later slots. The round it sits in can only grow by one spin per additional Scatter.

Owls' dream rounds keep the tempo flowing. Two of mine landed 11 spins apart, on spins 160 and 171. Combined with the stacked centre wild, they can take the game past what the base game pays. On spin 100 the base game paid 0.48 and the round that followed it paid 9.00. Winning potential, for example, reaches 458x the bet, which is slight next to the studio's later releases. My four rounds paid 15.0x, 2.2x, 16.0x and 14.0x the stake. Though across 430 spins at a 0.60 stake I observed nothing remotely near it, the best single spin returning 67x and the session finishing at an 84.3% return, it should be noted. That best spin, number 166, came out of the base game rather than a Dream. A max win figure is only part of the tale, however. The gap between the third round and the fourth ran 168 spins. Owls isn't quite as catching as its sibling slots could be, and another possible worry is how sparsely the rounds paid: four Dream Spins triggers came in. They arrived on spins 100, 160, 171 and 339. None of them ran past five spins, and between them they accounted for just 13% of everything won.

What extra Scatters would have done

However, Owls continues a slots custom that has proven hugely popular. What 430 spins did not settle is what a Dream looks like when extra Scatters stretch it past its five spins, because mine never were stretched.