Rainbow Reels

In the mood for some leprechaun-istic flavoured action? If the answer to that question is yes, then here is an online slot from developer Pragmatic Play which might fit the bill. It’s called Rainbow Reels and transports players to a magical part of the planet where leprechauns, rainbows, and maybe metaphorical pots of gold abound. It also uses an unusual Seven Layers feature which may sound a little bizarre at first, but if you can manage to get it to pop during the free spins bonus round, then it starts to make a whole lot more sense. Here’s how it all works.

For the base game, players are treated to a very green-looking land full of plants and sunshine. Well, it can’t possibly always be sunny here; there must be a good share of rain to keep the flora looking so lush and healthy. Anyway, a cheerful leprechaun chap stands next to the reels to the right of the screen, also appearing on one of Rainbow Reels’ high-pay symbols. The jaunty vibes are accentuated by a jaunty tune to produce an Irish folklore-inspired slot that’s, well, jaunty.

Rainbow Reel’s gaming occurs on a 5×4 grid with 40 paylines, and 7 layers. The layers aspect probably won’t make much sense at the moment but will be covered shortly in the features section. Run by a highly volatile math model, Rainbow Reels produces a default return to player value of 96.07% when betting 20 p/c to £/€240 per spin or 96.05% when buying free spins, which costs 100 times the bet to do so. Winning combinations are created by landing matching symbols along a payline from the leftmost side of the grid on consecutive reels.

A bunch of classic/generic/familiar symbols appear on Rainbow Reels’ paytable. These are 10 to A card ranks as the low pays, then a pipe, a mug of beer, a horseshoe, some boots, a top hat, and a leprechaun as the high pays. Landing a 5 OAK winning line will get you 1.25x to 2.5x the bet when formed of low-pay royals or 3 to 10 times the stake when formed of premium picture symbols. Wilds hit on all reels as well, paying out up to 10x the bet for a 5 wild win, or they may substitute for all symbols in the game except the scatter.

Rainbow Reels: Slot Features

Rainbow Reels uses a repeat wins style feature with an unusual Seven Layer limit, free spins, and a bonus buy as its features.

Seven Layers

In Rainbow Reels, all positions on the reels have up to 7 layers. The initial spin shows the topmost layer. Whenever a symbol is part of a winning combination, it is removed from the board and reveals the next layer, containing a random symbol beneath it. This process continues when consecutive wins occur until reaching the final layer. After the symbol on the final layer has been removed, the position will remain empty.

Free Spins

Scatters appear on reels 1, 3 and 5, and hitting 3, 4, or 5+ of them awards 2x, 10x, or 100x the bet, respectively, plus 12 free spins. Free spins use the same 7 layer system as in the base game, except when reaching the last layer of every position, wild symbols are guaranteed to appear. These wild symbols display a counter showing how many times they can be used in a winning combination until they disappear. The counter can show anything from 3 to a maximum of 13. Hitting 3 or more scatters during the feature awards players 6 additional free spins.

Rainbow Reels: Slot Verdict

The term ‘a game of two halves’ crops up in sports when one team outplays the other in the first half only to end up getting dominated in the second. To borrow the phrase, Rainbow Reels was a real game of two halves. At first, the idea of limiting what is kind of like a tumbling wins style feature (where symbols are replaced rather than tumble downwards) felt a bit dumb. If you manage to reach 7 layers down in the base game, positions just turn blank, meaning they contribute nothing going forward. What is the point, one wondered – at first.

The second half of Rainbow Reels kicked in when free spins bonus rounds started flaring up and producing thrilling results. There, having wilds with counters as the final layer made a huge difference, and free spins could morph into ridiculous wild fests, with wilds smothering the reels, leading to loads of repeat wins as their counters ticked down to zero and their positions were shut down. It’s a feature which might sound so-so on paper but really has to be seen in action to get the full effect. So mesmerising were some of the consecutive win runs that any negativity produced by reviewing yet another leprechaun-themed slot was washed away in a tidal wave of good vibes. Of course, Rainbow Reels is hardly going to deliver big wins all the time, but when it does, it is quite a sight to behold.

At best, Rainbow Reels is capable of producing wins up to a cap of 5,000x the bet, which came across as pretty realistic, relatively speaking, after seeing the 7 layers and wilds do their thing. Once again, Pragmatic Play has managed to come up with a compelling new idea that is fairly simple but potentially rather exciting. Even players fed up, lukewarm, or fatigued by the idea of another leprechaun slot may find Rainbow Reels’ 7 layers concept of interest, in the bonus round at least.