Slot Mechanics

Transferring Wilds

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Slot Mechanics

It’s always nice to see slot games go from being average products to something spectacular. Sometimes it takes ingenious graphics and animations. Sometimes it takes a great theme or soundtrack.

Two meshed gears beside a reel window — game mechanics
Two meshed gears beside a reel window — game mechanics

However, a large part of the time, it takes intriguing and innovative bonus features. More so in particular, wild symbols. Whenever these show up on the reels, it’s always a pleasure seeing them stand in for other standard icons to help you out with a win. You can often get a steady stream of wins when incorporating wild icons into a combination.

Transferring wilds are a further development on the standard offering, providing avid gamers with just another reason to keep coming back to the slots that are so entertaining. While these do have the same inbuilt actions as a standard icon of the same type, thereby being able to substitute other icons on the reels, they have also had their own special extra perk added alongside this.

What’s a Transferring Wild?

Being a variation on the standard doesn’t make it anything difficult to understand. In fact, transferring wilds are now becoming one of the more popular features to include in slot games, and are actually quite liked by well-known developer WMS.

In order to incorporate one of these into a game, developers need to provide a product that incorporates more than one reel set. So, anything with two, three or even four reel sets have the possibility of also featuring transferring wild icons. With this being the case, this is quite possibly the version of the developed wild that has the biggest potential to provide huge payouts. As it’s name suggests, it has the great ability to transfer from one location to another, significantly improving players’ chances of scoring big.

How Do They Work?

As mentioned, in order to include a wild of this nature into a game, producers need to provide more than one reel set. Take for example, WMS’s offering, ‘Fire Queen‘. This particular game has three sets of reels, two small 2×2 pieces and a third 3 x 6 set. The icon of the fire queen herself acts as the wild symbol, and should it appear on either of the 2×2 sets, it will automatically transfer across to the other, meaning that the fire queen will show now on both 2×2 reel sets in the same position. This then allows winning combinations to be made up from the first reel of the 2×2 sets through to the third reel of the third set.

Because there are now several wilds spread out across reel sets, the possibilities for creating a multitude of winning combinations is even bigger than it would be had there just been a single wild on the reels. There’s nothing special that needs to be achieved on the reels for a transferring wild to be triggered. It simply moves from one place to another by itself. The only thing you need to hope for is it to show up once you have completed a spin. The icon will then do the rest by itself.

Multiple Transferring Wilds

While this particular development doesn’t appear in a huge amount of games for the moment, it’s popularity is increasing. Not only because of the chance to claim big wins from a single spin, but because of the fact that there can be multiple cases of these symbols transferring from one location to another. So, should you have two reel sets and two wilds show on the first reel set, that means two will transfer to the second. That gives you a total of four symbols altogether, doubling your winning chances.

Popular Games

It’s a shame that this featured wild is utilised far more frequently by WMS rather than many other developers picking it up, as it can provide massive appeal to some players. Of the WMS products that incorporate this feature, WMS’s ‘Kiss‘ product, based on the rock band of the same name, is somewhat popular. The aforementioned ‘Fire Queen’ from the same company is probably their best known product which includes the transferring wild, while the ‘Bruce Lee: Dragon’s Tale’ offering sees you go face to face with the martial arts expert.

The transferring wild, while being less well-known in comparison to others like the stacked or sticky developments, is actually able to provide some nice payouts and interesting game play.

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