No matter what you’re doing in life, there’s nothing like getting something for free. Pokies allow us to enjoy something for nothing on a regular basis thanks to a common feature known as free spins. Found in a very high percentage of poker machines, free spins bonuses allow you to sit back and enjoy watching the winnings roll in without requiring you to spend any of your own money. This article looks at Free Spins as a feature of a game - however you may also be interested in Free Spins as a promotion or marketing tool by a casino.
Most free spins features are fairly simple to understand. On a typical pokie that offers a free spins game, the feature will be tied to a certain set of symbols. If you hit those symbols on an active payline, you’ll find yourself rewarded with some number of free spins.
These free spins typically work just like a normal spin. Depending on the machine you’re playing, you might get a variable number of spins (sometimes you can randomly get different numbers of spins each time the feature is activated), and it’s also possible that your winnings during the free spins game could feature a multiplier on your winnings.
Sometimes, free spins are awarded as part of a larger bonus round. In these cases, free spins might be just one of several different prizes you can win in a special feature; at other times, you might determine the number of spins and/or the size of your multiplier based on how well the bonus game goes. In other special features, you might get to choose between different types of free spins features that offer differing amounts of spins, multipliers, and perhaps special wild symbols on the reels during the game.
In a very general sense, there are two types of free spins: those that can be retriggered and those that cannot. If free spins can be retriggered, that means that it is possible to hit the combination of symbols that gave you free spins again during the feature, adding even more free spins to your total. For instance, if you started with 10 free spins, then hit the right combination again during the special feature, you might ultimately earn 20, 30 or even more spins.
In almost all cases, the free spins will automatically play. It’s also standard practice for those spins to be played for the same number of coins and lines as the spin that triggered the bonus feature.
Because the idea of using free spins is a pretty basic one that can be combined with so many other features, there are a lot of variations on the standard free spins format. Free spins could take place on an entirely different set of reels, bring new symbols into the game, or allow you access to even more bonus features that you can’t reach in the main game.
One example of an interesting way to handle free spins can be found in the X-Men poker machine by Playtech. If players hit three scatter symbols on the same spin, they will unlock a very special free spins game in which only half of the symbols (those that belong to the good characters of the X-Men universe) are on the reels. This mode can go on indefinitely, as there is no limit on the number of free spins a player can receive.
The only thing that will end it is hitting the one Magneto extra wild on the reels; hitting that ends “Heroes” mode and turns the game into “Villains” mode instead. In that mode, players only have eight free spins to enjoy before the feature ends. Still, it is possible to get back into the unlimited free spins of Heroes mode if the player can hit the Professor Xavier wild during Villains mode.
Free spins are popular because they are so simple to understand. There is no need to think about complex strategies or how to play a special mini-game; players can instead simply enjoy watching the spins play themselves and collect their rewards at the end.
However, there is one downside to free spins. Because they only offer spins on a pokie, they don’t actually guarantee any wins. That means that they will sometimes give out prizes that are much smaller than any other bonus feature; in theory, it is even possible to win nothing! Of course, they can also award some massive prizes if you’re lucky enough to have just one or two perfect spins.
While different games can have all kinds of features, free spins are one that you’ll find on almost any poker machine you play. If you want to try and earn some free spins, it’s as easy as visiting an online casino and firing up any pokie you like!