Free Cluster Pays Slots

Touching, not lining up

A cluster pays slot has no paylines. Matching symbols that touch horizontally or vertically form a win, the winners vanish, new symbols drop in, and the sequence repeats until nothing connects. The minimum cluster varies by game. Most of the grids here pay from five symbols, while NetEnt's Aloha! Cluster Pays, a 6x5 game from March 2016, needed nine. Grid size varies as well: Jammin' Jars uses 8x8, Reactoonz, Fruit Party and Sugar Rush use 7x7, and Hand of Anubis uses five reels by six rows.

Where each game keeps its multiplier

Because the base mechanic is shared, the multiplier design is what separates the games.

• Jammin' Jars: the jam jar is wild and scatter. Its multiplier starts at 1x, rises with each win it joins, and the jar moves to a neighbouring cell.
• Fruit Party: random multipliers attach to winning symbols, 2x in the base game and up to 4x in free spins, and they multiply each other, to a stated 256x.
• Sugar Rush: exploded cells are marked. A later hit on the same cell adds a multiplier that starts at 2x and doubles, to 128x. Sugar Rush 1000 and Super Scatter raise the cap to 1,024x.
• Reactoonz: no free spins round. Wins charge a meter that sends in a Gargantoon wild and sets off Quantum features.
• Hand of Anubis: Soul Orb wilds build multipliers, and the Underworld free spins keep five column multipliers under the grid.

By pace, Fruit Party and Sugar Rush are the easiest to read, Jammin' Jars follows a single moving wild, and Reactoonz and Hand of Anubis ask for the most rules.

Frequent wins, high volatility

Cluster games often list a hit frequency of around a third of spins, such as 37.17% for Fruit Party and 36.92% for Hand of Anubis in databases. That sits comfortably beside a high volatility label, since a hit counts any win, including ones below the stake. Top wins listed run from 4,570x for Reactoonz to 19,998.5x for Jammin' Jars, and 50,000x for Sugar Rush Super Scatter. The mechanic itself says nothing about return. Headline figures here sit between 96.00% for Sugar Rush 1000 and 96.83% for Jammin' Jars, and one listing for Reactoonz 2 shows settings as low as 84.2%. The guide on why the same slot can have different RTP explains the gaps.

The demos use virtual credits and the studios' unmodified games. Gambling in Ontario is for adults 19 and over. ConnexOntario offers free, confidential help on 1-866-531-2600, and our responsible gambling page has more.