Random Wilds

What is a Wild? The classic icon substitutes for regular symbols, in turn creating winning combinations all over the reels. Some even come with multipliers or big prizes to win.

Random Wilds is a reference entry rather than a review: it collects the games in this library that belong under the heading and says what the heading actually means, because on a casino site it is usually a marketing label and nothing more.

Two things are worth knowing about lists like this one. A theme is a skin — the artwork, the soundtrack and the symbol set change, the mathematics underneath does not, and two games sharing a theme can behave nothing alike. A feature name, on the other hand, is often a trademark: the same rule ships under a different word in every studio’s catalogue, so a game missing from a list of one name may well be on the list of another name for the same thing. Where that is the case, the entry says which family the rule belongs to instead of pretending the label is unique.

Every game named below has its own spec sheet with the layout and the figures the studio published for it. The rules behind the features are taken apart family by family in Slot Mechanics, the arithmetic is in Slot Math, and the full index of sheets is Slots A–Z.

Random wilds are wilds the engine adds to the screen rather than wilds that land on a reel. The spin resolves, the feature fires, one or more positions are overwritten with a wild symbol, and the pay rule is applied again to the changed screen. Nothing about the reel strips changes — the wilds are an overlay, which is why they can appear in positions the reel set has no wild symbol on at all.

They are usually a base-game filler: a feature that arrives often, pays small, and keeps a long dry stretch from being empty. That is the opposite job from sticky wilds, which hold a position across spins, and from expanding wilds, which fill a reel from a single landed symbol. What to read in the paytable: how many wilds the feature adds, whether the count is fixed or drawn, whether the added wild carries a multiplier, and whether it can appear during free spins as well as in the base game — the same name covers all four designs.

The rest of the wild family is described in wild symbols, and the other reel mechanics are in Slot Mechanics.

To bring something new to the table, slot developers have given these Wilds a hell of an upgrade. Here’s where random Wilds come in; who wouldn’t love a surprise appearance to help form that winning combination? Random Wilds differ from your standard Wilds in the way that they pop up when you least expect it, adding a whole new level of excitement to the game. However, how often they appear varies from slot to slot.

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