Sticky Wilds on Slot Machines – Learn Exactly How They Work

Slots with Sticky Wilds

Wild symbols have become an integral part of today’s online video slots, and they’ve come a long way from the original symbols found on the early one-armed bandits.

Wilds act in much the same way as the joker in a game of cards, which substitutes itself for any other card to make a winning hand. In the case of slots, these symbols substitute for all other symbols to make a winning combination.

There are some symbols that they cannot substitute for, including scatters and bonus or free spins icons on some games, but they can generate big wins and game developers have come up with plenty of innovative ways of using them.

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Wilds and Online Slots

Online games are much more complex than traditional three-reel games, and five or more reels with multiple paylines are commonplace. Online developers have therefore come up with a variety of ways to use wilds to make games more entertaining.

For example, the wild in the 2Can online slot by Aristocrat is the Toucan, and as well as substituting for any other symbol to form a winning line, it also comes into play in the bonus round. When the free spins feature is being played, any Toucan on the reels will fly off and bring back a second Toucan which will land in a different position, potentially generating extra wins.

That’s just one game, but developers have gone much further and developed sticky wilds, shifting wilds, expanding wilds, cascading wilds, and used the wild symbol for all sorts of different functions. With state-of-the-art video and 3D graphics, more games are featuring animated wilds as well as incorporating digital sound effects and video streaming. This makes for a much more immersive experience, and modern slots are much more exciting than their predecessors.

How do Sticky Wild Symbols Work?

Sticky Wilds act as a standard wild and will substitute for any other symbol to create a winning line, but where they differ is that they will remain on the reel for subsequent spins. They are often found in free spin bonus rounds, where they will stay for the duration of the free spins and can generate huge extra wins as part of the bonus feature.

Other Wild Symbols

Some of the other common types of wilds include wilds on games with cascading reels, which cause the winning line to explode allowing other symbols to fall in their place which could create more winning combinations. Shifting wilds work in the same way as sticky wilds, staying on the reels for subsequent spins after they have appeared, but they slowly shift their way around the reels with each spin until they disappear off the screen.

Stacked wild icons are another popular variation, and they appear as a number of wild stacked on top of one another, which can fill the entire reel and generate winners across several paylines. In a similar vein, expanding wilds will grow over the entire reel once they appear, creating a similar effect where several paylines could be converted to winning ones.

You can read more of our guides to wilds and other online slot features, but if you’re keen to get playing the games and see the wilds, check out our selection of free and real money slots that you can play online right now.