Snake Eyes Slot Machine
While you may not have thought dice games and slots would be in any way compatible, Zeus gaming has found a way to bring the two staples of the online gambling industry together in Snake Eyes.
A simple 3-reel slot on the face of it, Snake Eyes actually features the maximum 27 paylines available and a couple of nifty additional features that can significantly boost your winnings. While there is no bonus feature, wilds symbols are present and have a much bigger impact than in most other games.
Before delving into the ins and outs of the game, however, we would warn that Snake Eyes is not a title for consistent payouts. In spite of the 27 active paylines, in practice we went 60 turns without a win, but when a good spin finally does come around, it often makes up for it with a huge payout.
Roll Them Bones
As you’d expect from a conventional 3-reel slot title, there’s not an awful lot for players to learn about Snake Eyes. The 27 paylines are fixed from the start, meaning the only thing you need to worry about is how much to wager each go, with a minimum of 40 and a maximum of 500 available.
All winning combinations must contain three matching symbols, with a minimum payout of 2x your total bet available for twos-to-fours and a maximum prize of 36x your bet available for the red Chinese dice symbol. These amounts are, however, multiplied whenever a wild icon is substituted.
While that may not sound like all that much, you must consider that this amount is reflective of your total bet rather than your stake per line, and with 27 paylines active at all times, you’ll typically activate several at once whenever one or more wild symbols appear anywhere on the 3 reels.
The Diceman Cometh
Snake Eyes is definitely one of the more unique designs that we’ve seen from the team at Zeus Gaming – and though it is a simple enough theme, it is one that has been executed well. All symbols on the reels depict different values on different coloured dice, with the numbers two-through-six from Western dice and three coloured symbols on plain white dice from the Chinese set of symbols.
Unsurprisingly, the game’s wild symbol is the titular Snake Eyes – the term given whenever a player rolls the dreaded double one in Craps – and these are depicted on golden dice with the word “wild” emblazoned beneath. The gameboard itself, meanwhile, looks more like an old-fashioned jukebox than a slot machine, with twinkling lights around the reels immediately drawing your attention.
All in all, Snake Eyes has a clean design that is easy to read and quite nice to look at, which is probably just as well because there are no special sound effects recorded for the game. Instead, Zeus Gaming have opted to use the traditional sound bank that they use for many of their live titles.
Hot Shooter
Although there is no bonus round in Snake Eyes, there are one or two additional features that do at least serve to make the game a tad more interesting. The first is the influence that wild symbols have over the payout table, which is significant because every three-of-a-kind combination that is made with the help of a wild symbol pays out substantially more.
While it may only add an extra 1x your bet for the lowest value symbols, this multiplier rises exponentially when it gets to the higher value symbols, with the top award being 54x your bet – as opposed to the regular 36x – when you complete a red Chinese symbol three-of-a-kind using a wild.
The other little extra tucked away in Snake Eyes is the fact that symbols are clumped together on the reels, which in turn results in an additional bonus. Should you fill all nine spaces on the game’s reels with the same dice, not only will you win a payout for all 27 lines, the entire amount will also be multiplied by four. This means a maximum jackpot of 216x your bet can be snagged if you’re lucky.
Worth A Gamble
Zeus Gaming have taken quite a risk with Snake Eyes, but we think its original theme and cool design have really paid off. Although wins can be few and far between, the payout system incorporated in the game means the rewards are big when you do finally break your losing streak – and the fact that you can fill the entire board with one symbol certainly gives you something to shoot for.
