The video age has enabled game designers to get creative in any number of ways, and that includes the way they use reels and symbols. One of the latest wrinkles is Cluster Power, a new way to play you’ll be seeing in the coming year on Aristocrat Technologies’ Sons of Anarchy slot machine.
With Cluster Power, any three or more adjacent symbols can form a paying combination. Matching symbols can be touching vertically, horizontally, in a line, on the first three reels, in a stack on the last reel alone – as long as you have three or more adjacent, that’s a winner.
Having no matching symbols on the leftmost reels doesn’t eliminate your chances at a winner. With Cluster Power, you still have a chance right to the end.
As for Sons of Anarchy, it’s based on the FX television hit drama about an outlaw motorcycle club, their lives and challenges.
“The game’s not focused on the violence of a motorcycle, game,” Siobhan Lane, Aristocrat’s senior director of product management and strategy, casino operations, told me before a tour of the company’s booth at Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. “It’s about the key characters, and really getting into the depths of those characters. They all have a strong appetite for something, whether it’s being the leader of the gang or wanting stability or keeping the family together. So really focusing on those traits and the family is what the studio has focused on in creating the gameplay.”
In the same game, Aristocrat also steps outside the box with a No Limits feature. Megasymbols of the shows five lead characters take up multiple spaces, leaving for the potential for the symbol to land partially in the playing field, and partially out of view. When that happens, the field can grow both vertically and horizontally to accommodate the symbol.
For example, if a Jax Teller symbol is three symbols wide and three symbols deep, but lands so that it shows only one symbol on the last space to the right on the bottom row, then the reels can expand two more spaces to the right and two more deep to accommodate the entire megasymbol and potentially create extra winning combinations.
