Introduced by Big Time Gaming (BTG), Megaclusters are a fairly new concept in gaming. They give you the chance to expand the number of available symbols by racking up wins.

Megaways Slots – A Popular Trend In Casino Gaming. There was a time years ago (and veteran players probably remember this) when a video slot with 25 pay lines was considered a game with an insane amount of different ways to wins. What are Megaclusters slots? Megaclusters™ is the latest innovation in gaming engines to hit the world of online slots. This captivating pay mechanic is the creation of Australian slot provider Big Time Gaming. The RTP (return to player) of Kluster Krystals Megaclusters is 96.49%. This is about average for online slots today – but still on the higher end of the scale. It is also highly volatile slot – a 5/5 on Relax Gaming’s own scale. The Kluster Krystals Megaclusters slot machine brings this realm to PCs and mobiles via the casino games developer, Relax Gaming. Your aim is to create clusters of eight or more matching crystals, although each symbol can appear In single, double, triple, or quadruple format to make it easier. Star Clusters Megaclusters slot machine is another revolutionary release from Big Time Gaming. Playable for 0.20 to 20 credits, it boasts an RTP of 96.54% and volatility is off the charts. Clusters of five or more symbols split and react, there are regular and Gold Wilds, and the win multiplier is unlimited.

Megaclusters have the potential to revolutionize gaming. At the very least, this mechanism should spawn similar slots.

Of course, the chance always exists that Megaclusters won’t have much of an impact and fade away quickly. I’m going to discuss more on this mechanism along with if it’ll become a hit or quickly disappear.

How Do Megaclusters Slots Work?

Most real money slots offer a set amount of positions or symbols. A five-reel, three-row (5×3 grid) slot, for example, offers 15 positions no matter what.

However, Megaclusters work differently from the average slot and do offer more positions. You can read about their finer points below.

Cluster Pays

If you’ve played a cluster pays slot before, then you shouldn’t have much trouble figuring out Megaclusters. A clusters game doesn’t offer traditional paylines.

Instead, it features a square grid. For example, BTG’s Star Clusters Megaclusters starts with a 4×4 grid.

You score payouts by landing clusters of matching icons going vertically or horizontally. Each cluster must include five or more symbols.

Everything Begins With the Avalanche Win

Once this happens, new icons fall from above to fill out the vacant spaces. The game re-evaluates the reels to determine if any new payouts are possible.

Avalanche gives you an opportunity to score more winning combinations in a round. As you’ll see below, it also unlocks additional positions.

This process continues until no more payouts can form. Afterward, the grid reverts back to its original size.

One Position Becomes Four

Under normal circumstances, avalanche would cause new icons to drop from the top of the reels to fill empty spaces. However, a Megaclusters slot works slightly differently in this regard.

Symbols from winning combos still vanish. The key difference, though, is that four new icons appear to take their places.

Here’s an example of this phenomenon:

• You land 10 clusters in a winning combination.
• Each symbol involved vanishes.
• 10 x 4 = 40
• You now have 40 positions in place of the previous 10 that vanished.

The Grid Keeps Expanding

As mentioned before, Stars Clusters Megaclusters begins with a 4×4 grid (64 positions). However, this area expands as more avalanche wins form.

The base game allows the grid to grow as large as 8×8 (64 positions). You can grow it even further in the bonus round (covered next).

Bonus Offers Even More Opportunities

Star Clusters awards two free spins every time that you net five consecutive avalanche wins. The default grid expands to 8×8 during the bonus.

Megaclusters, of course, are still active during free spins. You can increase the grid up to 16×16 (256 positions).

What Is the Potential Behind Megaclusters?

You can see that these slots are quite unique. But what do they offer besides simply being interesting? Here are the biggest benefits to Megaclusters slots.

More Ways to Win

A 4×4 slot is pretty boring for the most part. Therefore, you may not be thrilled upon first opening up Star Clusters.

However, you’ll eventually grow the number of positions and have more opportunities to win. At 8×8, you’ll have lots of area to score matching clusters of five symbols or more.

The bonus round is even more exciting. Not only does the grid begin at 8×8, but it has the potential to reach 16×16.

A 16×16 grid is unheard of in the gaming world. I’ve never seen a grid slot go beyond 8×8 up until this point.

Potential for Big Payouts

The average slot offers a top payout worth around 5,000x your stake. BTG’s Star Clusters Megaclusters blows the doors off this standard max win.

You can earn up to 23,000x your stake when accounting for features, avalanche wins, and Megaclusters. Assuming you’re betting $1 per spin/round, you can win up to $23,000.

Star Clusters offers a max stake worth $20. That said, you can earn up to $460,000 when using the top bet size.

Exciting Side Features

BTG is one of the best when it comes to revolutionary slots features. They haven’t sold players short with Megaclusters either.

As mentioned before, you can trigger free spins with five straight avalanche wins. You’ll receive another free spin for each avalanche win past five.

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This game also boasts a gold multiplier wild. The multiplier can increase wins up to 10x, at which point, you’ll receive more free spins for additional avalanches.

Reasons Why Megaclusters Could Be Forgotten

The Megaclusters engine has a lot going for it. However, the following reasons could prevent this mechanism from gaining widespread popularity.

Small Sample Size

BTG has only released Star Clusters Megaclusters at the time of this writing. And while Star Clusters is popular already, it’s just one game.

More slots are needed before Megaclusters slots have truly made it. Only time will tell if this mechanism becomes as popular as BTG’s famous Megaways engine.

Megaways Are Still Hot

Dragon Born introduced gamblers to Megaways slots in 2016. Ever since, Megaways have been the hottest thing in online gaming.

Gamblers have flocked to play these slots. In turn, other developers now pay BTG to license the Megaways format.

Nothing is to say that Megaclusters can’t thrive at the same time. However, the widespread number of Megaways makes for a more crowded gaming industry.

Symbols Are Hard to See

If you’re like many other gamblers, you like playing slots on your smartphone. You’ll find that Megaclusters are hard to see on a 5.5-inch phone screen.

I’ve played Star Clusters on my PC and had trouble making out the details in the smaller symbols. This matter only becomes more of a struggle when dealing with a smartphone.

You’ll barely be able to see anything once the grid grows beyond 8×8. Assuming you’re somebody who values the little details, you may hate this aspect.

Will Megaclusters Ultimately Be Successful?

Megaclusters aren’t perfect when considering the downsides covered above. However, they still offer loads of potential.

Megaways, which see reels hold varying numbers of symbols, prove that players love changing grid sizes. Megaclusters also introduce this grid-changing aspect.

The base game begins with a rather simple 4×4 setup. But the latter quickly grows any time that you score a payout.

Even a five-symbol cluster turns into 20 positions. You can look forward to many more positions after getting 10+ symbol clusters.

BTG has also added extras that spice up the action. For starters, avalanche wins gives you the chance to keep earning payouts in a given round.

Gold multipliers not only substitute for other symbols but also multiply your wins. You can get a multiplier worth as much as 10x. Free spins become available when you net five consecutive avalanche payouts too. The default grid grows to 8×8 during this bonus.

Overall, Megaclusters slots seem to have all the ingredients to be very successful among players. But a larger sample size is needed before we truly know whether or not this is the case.

Conclusion

The past decade has seen plenty of revolutionary slots developments, including avalanche, Megaways, and expanding wilds. Megaclusters could very well be added to this list in the future.

These games see cluster wins vanish and make way for 4x the amount of symbols in their places. The end result is that you have more available positions and chances to win.

Megaclusters slots also offer added features, like win multipliers and free spins. Simply put, they boast lots of action, frequent wins, and the chance to score huge payouts.

The ultimate success of Megaclusters will hinge on future games. However, the first slot, Star Clusters, is already proving quite popular.

There was a time years ago (and veteran players probably remember this) when a video slot with 25 pay lines was considered a game with an insane amount of different ways to wins. This then led to slots with 30, 40 pay lines, and so on.

Changes were also made recently when manufacturers of games with a higher line volume were joined not only by NetEnt but also by Microgaming. In particular, 243-line games were one of the first halves of the 2010 season’s trendsetters with their wild wins – who among us wouldn’t remember, for example, just Microgaming‘s Immortal Romance, then Avalon II, Game of Thrones slot, Thunderstruck II or, for example, NetEnt‘s Twin Spin Deluxe and Alien Robots.

These 243-line games were the kind of the first tap toward Megaways that remain as the most popular slots nowadays. The 243-line games were, of course, made up of five reels and three lines, the most familiar layout that had all possible lines in use.

The big change was seen in about five years ago when Big Time Gaming, unknown to the general public, released a video slot bearing the name Dragon Born in early 2016. Dragon Born’s reception was ambivalent, to say the least. Some people thought it was out of control. The way Megaways work was also puzzling, as the larger designs give fewer pay lines and, of course, the fierce volatility raised the noise.

Although there was plenty of criticism and opinion is still divided, Dragon Born started a trend over the next few years that we dare say has changed online casino gaming completely.

What Are Megaways Slots?

The Megaways game is modeled after Big Time Gaming’s game engine with a line size commonly set between 15,625 – 117,649 ways to win. However, the number of lines may be larger or smaller than this, including the 3,136-line Dragon Match Megaways, the 512-line Joker Megaways, and the 200,704-line Great Rhino Megaways, and the 1 Million Megaways BC of Iron Dog Studio, which has a line capacity of 1,058 841. Note that other slots providers don’t just make Megaways slots, but require a Big Time Gaming permission so all other Megaways slots run with BTG’s Megaways license.

The ways to win of Megaways games vary from spin to spin, and the lowest line number can be only a few tens or a few hundreds on one spin, for example. The number of lines is influenced by the size of the symbols on the game screen, so larger is not better this time. The number of lines is usually seen somewhere in the game screen from its own meter and the lower part of the game shows the number of winning lines.

In addition, Megaways slot games include many other things and features typical of them. These include, for example, the so-called extra line, which is usually the size of four symbols and is defined as the upper or lower part of the reel in question, 2-5. This extra line helps to get more pay lines and may have special features such as the only place for wild symbols or scatters during free spins.

As for the rest of Megaways, one of the most typical is the cascading symbols with new ones dropping in their place. This is called a chain reaction and, more precisely, terms such as cascading symbols and reactive wins can also be seen. During free spins, each chain reaction or, better, every step of the chain reaction may increase the winning factor by one and these are not limited.

Almost all of the named features are fully and exclusively Megaways, but one strongly related brand is the bonus feature purchase option (something you can also find in many of Blueprint slot machines known as Bonus Buy option), which also bears the name Feature Drop or Feature Buy. In addition, there may be a purchase of another smaller function related to the base game. Such an option can be found in Extra Chilli slot, for example.

In general, such a purchase usually costs a hundred times the bet, but there are also some more expensive and slightly cheaper options. The price may be high and some people also question such options, but on the other hand, in Megaways it takes several hundred rounds to get scatter characters on average, so these can be pretty useful. The Bonus Buy option also does not mean that the game gives a minimum number of free spins or the worst possible starting point for the bonus round, but it may well give extra scatter characters just as usual when running a base game.

Some games also have the option of gambling on bonus rounds purchased or received through scatters. In this case, you can try to get even more free spins of profit, but the risk is also to lose everything that is followed by a return to the basic game. This option is, for example, available in Who Wants To Be a Millionaire Megaways slot.

The bonus purchase function is also strongly associated with a kind of collection of coins with the Big Time Gaming logo during the basic game, which can drop these purchase prices to the desired amount, or up to zeros, when the function automatically starts. For example, this can be found in Big Time Gaming’s White Rabbit Megaways. A single coin received on the game screen will normally drop from 0.20 to 2 times the price of the bet. The price usually doesn’t go down at any particularly fast pace, but it does come down either way if you don’t want to pay the full price.

What Is Behind Megaways Slots’ Popularity?

The popularity of Megaways is certainly influenced by the fact that they are so different from what has been seen before. Of course, this divides players in half, because not all of us are Megaways fans.

What then makes Megaways games so different? Well, all the features mentioned in the previous text, but also their very high volatility. Every time you start playing, you know that there is little chance of those ”once-in-a-lifetime hits”, but at the same time, for example, a hundred times the size of a bet, you might feel like a king in one blink of an eye.

Megaways slots definitely have potential jackpot winnings. A win of a thousand or a few thousand times the size of a bet is perhaps more likely to come from these games than from somewhere else, but they are very rare, too. Let alone talk about the actual jackpot winnings, their odds may already be compared to winning the jackpot.

Of course, more or less big wins for us players are sought by everyone. It’s entertainment for most of us, and that’s how it should be. Every game must be fun and losses are a part of gambling, but if you have a tendency to hit a new deposit to keep losing, then wherever you go, Megaways games can be the beginning and root of all evil.

The popularity of Megaways games is also influenced by the fact that many of them have been created as sequels to the previously published and popular games. In addition, when there are largely more than ten Megaways game manufacturers, many of them find a good Megaways slot among their favorite slots providers, and several of these providers have also blended their Megaways with their previously familiar features from their older games whether it’s the Blueprint Gaming’s Buffalo Rising Megaways, WMS’s Raging Rhino Megaways, or BTG’s Monopoly Megaways slot machine.

Most Popular and Best Megaways Slots

The most popular and best Megaways games include, in particular, the early releases of Big Time Gaming.
If you haven’t played Megaways slots yet, you’ll find your own favorites, but to form your opinion on Megaways, we recommend you test the following or some of the following from the most popular megaways:

• Bonanza
• Dragon Born
• Extra Chilli Megaways
• Gonzo’s Quest Megaways
• Raging Rhino Megaways
• Flower Fortune Megaways
• Vikings Unleashed Megaways
• White Rabbit Megaways
• Who Wants To Be a Millionaire
• Survivor Megaways
• Monopoly Megaways
• Primal Megaways
• Fishin’ Frenzy Megaways

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Of the above slots, Bonanza is perhaps the first popular name of the Megaways, which may also hold its position for a long time to come. Dragon Born was the first work of Megaways games previously mentioned. Extra Chilli Megaways actually contain everything that Megaways normally involve. Raging Rhino Megaways is a Megaways version of the previously released Williams Interactive Raging Rhino. Vikings Unleashed is one of the personal favourites, where you can find the Bonus Buy option with different price tags. White Rabbit has even gained popularity as a Bonanza-like Megaways slot game with free spins of its own, Feature Drop, and the Caterpillar special feature of the basic game.

Let us add, however, that almost all of the Megaways named above are already published several years ago, so we recommend exploring the new Megaways of the early 2020s as well. In this time we have seen some changes in Megaways games, although, of course, the traditional 117,649 ways to win video slots with the unlimited increasing multipliers of Free Spins have been published repeatedly.

Megaways Slot Machines In the Days to Come

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As we have seen, more or less Megaways slots have come to stay. You can’t completely collapse this kind of popularity in any way. For Megaways, at least a similar trend can be expected as for NetEnt’s most legendary games, jackpot games or 243-line games. Along with these, the popularity may decline slightly, but those most popular and well-known games will never disappear from the players’ favorites.

In fact, even more of the game types just mentioned are expected from Megaways. Perhaps something different is still coming out of this, as seen by Blueprint Gaming in early 2020 when it released its first Megaways All Action game, but we believe that even in the years to come, the base of the favourite games will be very similar to Megaways.

Even now we can see further development in the slot machines. And again, Big Time Gaming is the one who is developing something more complex than Megaways or at least, something in a similar manner. Yes, we speak of the Big Time Gaming’s Megaclusters slots that can be another revolutionary step in the iGaming. Their first slot in this category is Star Clusters Megaclusters slot machine.

For some reason, it seems that the layout and other things that enhance the gaming experience are not so important to us players, but an interesting game with good features and great chances of winning will be the thing now and always.