Viking Runecraft Slot – Free Demo

Five touching symbols and the cascade that follows

Viking Runecraft is one of the few slots from Play'n GO with a cluster pays grid and a god standing over it (to the best of my knowledge, at least). I played it for 470 spins and finished 1,143.00 down. Most crucially, however, Viking Runecraft provides solid win potential and a couple of intriguing features. The features are Gift of the Gods, Runes of Valhalla, Charge of Destruction and Ragnarök. I will run through them below.

The game is played using a 7-reel, 7-row grid matrix along with cluster pays. That is 49 positions, and a win needs five of them adjacent. 5 or more matching symbols touching horizontally and/or vertically pay out, and they are then removed so the rest cascade down. Nothing pays diagonally, and a cascade can chain if the falling symbols form a fresh cluster. If you trigger Ragnarök the game hands over a free round. As you can likely tell, Viking Runecraft makes use of a Norse theme. Hammer, helmet, axe and anchor sit above the rune stones in the paytable, and a cluster of fifteen or more hammers pays 1,000x the stake. The action unfolds under the eyes of four gods - Journeyman is the first level you play at and Æsir is the highest one.

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Winning on a Rune Stone is how you collect it

Aside from the standard symbols, there are also 5 Rune Stones. They are also the low end of the paytable, where even fifteen or more green runes come to 10x the stake. These are only handy once you have won on them, and they then feed the Runes of Valhalla bonus.

What Thor, Odin, Freya and Heimdall each do

Gift of the Gods may trigger on a round that has not yielded a win, and the round then carries on. The wilds it drops are the only way a dead round turns into a paying one. What you get is determined by which god appears. Which god that is depends on the level you have reached. Thor creates 5 to 9 wilds, Odin creates 4 wilds in pairs, Freya keeps creating wilds in four clusters until a win arrives, and Heimdall sets one wild per row.

Clearing the pattern lifts the level. Clearing one means winning on every position the game indicates. With at least one Rune Stone collected it also triggers the bonus wheel, and the collected stones activate the winning spaces. All five stones have to be won on separately to count as collected. Hitting one wins the bonus, and the bonus itself grows by 12% of the symbol win amounts.

Counting winning symbols to Ragnarök

Ragnarök is triggered when you have won on 40 symbols before any Charge of Destruction. Both counters run on winning symbols rather than on spins. It is also triggered on 20 more symbols after a Charge of Destruction has fired, and the Charge of Destruction itself activates after wins on 20 symbols. Each of the four effects destroys or transforms part of the grid, which keeps the cascade running. It arrives as one of four - Fury of Fenrir, Judgment of Jörmungandr, Scorching of Surtr or Lure of Loki.

Ragnarök is a free round rather than a count of free spins, and each of the four Charge features triggers once. Whenever the wins stop during the round, the next one fires. The round ends when all of them have.

Winning symbols keep counting during Ragnarök. The wheel shown during the round carries x2, x3, x5 and x15. Collecting them lifts the multiplier charge up to x15.

Minty Slots Verdict: 470 spins at 5.00 returned 1,207.00 against 2,350.00 wagered, and the one Ragnarök I drew paid 10x the stake, 4% of everything the session won. The biggest single spin, 45x on spin 209, came out of the base grid. Play'n GO had this 7x7 running in April 2017, ahead of the cluster board in Reactoonz and the pattern clearing of Rise of Olympus.

470 spins at Journeyman

This one did not become an immediate summer favorite. The balance went from 25,000.00 to 23,857.00. Across 470 spins at a 5.00 stake I got 1,207.00 back out of 2,350.00 wagered, a 51.4% return. The peak was 25,001.50 on spin 2, and the low point was the closing figure. There were only 105 paying spins, and 62 of those paid less than the stake, and the main game is very low potential. The longest run without a win was 16 spins, ending on spin 75. The Gift of the Gods feature is there to keep it a bit more engaging than it would otherwise have been, although the upside sits in the bonus. My best single spin was 225.00 on spin 209, 45x the stake. My lone Ragnarök, on spin 281, paid 50.00, which is 10x the stake and 4% of everything I won.