How many times have you exited an online slot wishing you had a second chance to make bank on that last combination? Sometimes, one symbol is the difference between walking away with the jackpot and leaving with nothing. The invention of the innovative Single Reel Respin feature has the ability to give you the second chance you’ve always wanted to help you land that winning combination by enabling you to independently spin any reel of your choice.

How Does It Work?

If you’re not familiar with the standard way of playing a video slot, this is how it goes; you select the size of your bet, hit the ‘Spin’ button and all five reels turn. Games displaying the Single Respin Feature play slightly differently. Reel Respins are offered in the form of a wager before you begin playing on the desired slot. Instead of spinning all your reels, you’re given the opportunity to choose a single reel to respin in an attempt to create the winning combination you just fell short of. More than that, you have the option to spin the same reel as many times as you like. However (there’s always a ‘but’), doing so will cost you.

Underneath each reel, you’ll find the ‘Respin’ icon and the price for each additional spin. You can also hover your mouse over the button of the selected reel to view the cost, which is always displayed in credits. What’s great about this feature is that it offers a more skill-based user experience wherein the player must rely on their own judgement to decide which reels to respin.

The Catch

Not everything in the garden is rosy! The price per reel respin varies as it depends on the other symbols on the pay-line, that is, the higher your chances of completing a winning combination, the higher the cost. Other than the cost of each respin being rather pricey on some reels, activating Autoplay mode will cause you to miss out on this unique feature as the reels will spin continuously for a predetermined number of times. Only once Autoplay is over will you be able to respin an individual reel of your choice. A final drawback is that you cannot use the respin feature during a bonus round. It will become available to you once the bonus feature comes to an end.

Slots featuring this function tend to be rather volatile and are aimed at players who enjoy these high variance games. It’s important to know that on a respin, only the wins that involve the respun reels are paid out. Furthermore, be aware that you can easily become hooked on this feature and, subsequently, overuse it, which will result in your going bust in no time.

The Strategy

There are several ways to utilise this feature to your advantage. Some players choose to spin each individual reel, one by one, until they create the winning combination they’re after, for example, five of a kind with the highest-value symbol. This is a high-risk strategy which could be detrimental to your bankroll, as you never know how long it will take to spin in the last icon, not forgetting that the last symbol will be the most costly.

An alternative strategy adopted by other players is less risky. When a scatter symbol appears on the reels, you can use the feature to spin in the two additional scatters needed to trigger the bonus round, which as you will see further on in the article, can be quite profitable for your bankroll. Remember, that in this case, your final third respin will come at a hefty price.

Slots Featuring Reel Respins Feature

So far, it’s Microgaming who seem to be the pioneers of this fresh feature in the industry. The Single Reel Respins function is prevalent in their ‘All Ways’ structured slots, within which you’re not playing a standard set of pay-lines. a couple of these online video slots are described below.

Wild Orient is an Asian themed 5×3 slot set in a lush bamboo forest. There are 243 ways to win in this game and not only can you choose which individual reels to spin, but the game also offers a lucrative free spins round. Once triggered by three or more elephant scatters, you’re awarded 15 free spins which can be retriggered, in addition, at the end of the bonus round all your winnings are tripled.

The Miami Ink inspired slot, Hot Ink, is a 1024 ways to win 5×4 reel slot. Along with the Single Reel Respin feature, the slot boasts a Tattoo Bonus activated by three or more Tattoo Bonus icons. You’re then taken to the feature page where you must click an album to reveal a combination of tattoos and win a prize. If all three of the tattoos chosen complete a set, you’re awarded 10 free spins. To top it all off, all your winnings at the end of this round will be doubled.

Retro Reels differs from the above two video slots as it takes on the classic fruit machine as its theme and features lots of bars, sevens, plums, cherries, lemons and dollar signs (you can see where it gets its name from). In this game, two or more scatter symbols in any position trigger the free spins feature. Two scatters awards you with 10 spins, whereas landing five scatters will grant you a load of 25 spins at no extra cost! As in Hot Ink, all your winnings from the bonus round come with a 2x multiplier. In this slot, it’s definitely worth using the respin tool to roll in some more scatters to unlock that fruitful bonus round.