Dead Man’s Drop

Dead Man's Drop: Slot Overview

Ghostly pirates, it's an odd, yet oddly popular combination that appears throughout slots and pop culture at large. The original, perhaps, is the Flying Dutchman, first mentioned in print in 1790, which was a ghost ship doomed to sail the seas, unable to ever make port, said to glow with a ghostly light as it traversed the waves. Software provider Slotmill has gotten all 'arrr' with a spectral pirate captain in its cluster pays slot Dead Man's Drop. As well as avalanches, clusters, and ghosts, players can look forward to Multiplier Wilds with values that double on wins up to x1,000, and which are sticky during free spins.

A dingy green misted grotto is where players are flung to when taking Dead Man's Drop for a base game spin. Despite the jaunty pirate music, the view is a spooky one, as if the ghosts of pirates past are drawn to the place under the leadership of a big bearded, undead captain before heading out to terrorise the high seas like a group of phantom hijackers off the Somali coast. Free spins see the action move into the open, but the bonus is no less spooky with its glowing green water and purple tinge. Spooky in a playful way that is, like a Scooby Doo episode.

Dead Man's Drop is a cluster pays slot held on a 6x6 symbol grid. Winning combinations are formed by having 5 or more matching symbols connected in horizontal and/or vertical directions, creating a cluster. Winning symbols vanish from the board and symbols avalanche down to replace them, repeating as long as new wins appear. Slotmill labels the volatility very high, and they've made two RTP variants, with 96.07% the preferred one. Players may stake 20c to $/€100 per spin, buy features, or activate the Xtra-Bet, which doubles the bet to make it 5.6x times more likely to trigger a bonus. Burst Mode is here, too, to terrifically speed things along.

Blue, green, red, and purple gems are joined by hooks, anchors, telescopes, swords, and ghost pirates on the paytable. Creating a 5 OAK cluster pays 0.1x to 0.75x, while the largest clusters of 14+ OAK are worth 4x to 25x the bet. Wilds appear on the grid in various ways, including landing on an initial spin. Yet, no matter the placement method, they are all able to replace any regular paying symbol in a winning combination.

Dead Man's Drop: Slot Features

Dead Man's Drop's features include Multiplier Wilds, Wild Spawn, several Power-Ups, free spins, super free spins, and Fast Track bonus buys.

Multiplier Wild Symbols

A winning cluster without a wild symbol creates a new wild symbol. When a wild is part of a win, it gets an x2 multiplier, which doubles in value when part of subsequent wins up to a possible x1,000. Wins are multiplied by the combined value of Multiplier Wild symbols in a winning cluster. Multiplier Wild symbols with values less than x1,000 merge in connected winning clusters, adding their values together.

Wild Spawn

Randomly, 2 to 3 wilds can spawn at the start of a spin before symbols drop in. There is a chance a Multiplier Wild spawns with a random multiplier.

Power-Ups

Landing Power-Up symbols award a corresponding modifier extra:

• Transform - activates when landed to convert all instances of a symbol on the reels and itself into another symbol.
• Instant Wild - activates when landed by converting into a Multiplier Wild with a value between x2 and x32.
• Bomb - activates when there are no more wins to remove up to 9 adjacent symbols except scatters, Power-Ups, and wilds, before turning itself wild.
• Symbol Removal - activates when there are no more wins and removes all instances of a symbol.

Free Spins and Super Free Spins

Landing 3 scatters triggers the bonus round, and 8 free spins are awarded. Multiplier Wilds are sticky during the round, and landing a +1 Spin symbol grants an extra free spin. Hitting 2 scatters and 1 super scatter triggers 8 super free spins. The mechanics of free spins are present, plus the Wild Spawn feature is awarded at the beginning of the round.

Fast Track

Fast Track offers the Super Bonus Hunt for 8x, which guarantees that when free spins trigger, they are super free spins. Players may also buy Wild Spawn for 40x, or Super Wild Spawn for 80x, which has minimum multiplier values of x32. Free spins cost 100x to trigger while super free spins cost 400x.

Dead Man's Drop: Slot Verdict

There are a lot of things that Slotmill does well, and a good number of them have been brought together in Dead Man's Drop. More specifically, the studio excels at crafting top-quality cluster pays slots, dropping potent wild multipliers into the mix (Tyrant's Fall, for instance), and winding the machine up real tight to the point it feels like it could spring apart, sending sparks and bits of metal flying about the place at any moment. All of this Dead Man's Drop possesses, and while it's not the most sophisticated slot the studio has designed, it packs a highly satisfying list of interweaving features that can lay waste to the game board in the right circumstances.

What's neat is that every win (without a wild) gets the ball rolling, not only kickstarting an avalanche sequence but placing a wild on the reels, which can get a multiplier that doubles on subsequent wins it's part of. Toss in Power-Ups, and the base game was a rather eventful phase of play. Not as eventful as free spins could be, though, and it was surprising to see how quickly and frequently it was possible to build an x1,000 Multiplier Wild - during super free spins, at least, which gets a major boost in the beginning from the Wild Spawn feature. However, actually linking the x1,000 to a win was another story, and often it would sit on its lonesome in a quiet part of the grid while what wins there were hit far, far away.

Still, it wouldn't take much of a combination to link with the x1,000 to produce a sizable win, and Dead Man's Drop's winning potential is sizable too, at 20,000x the bet. So, while the game is a little light on white hot innovation, Slotmill has stirred together a batch of strong features that play well together and are able to produce thrilling sequences of avalanching, multiplying, ghostly pirate action.