Night Roller

Night Roller: Slot Overview

You might not associate playing board games with big nights out on the razzle-dazzle, yet that's what developers Red Tiger and partner studio R7 have set out to achieve in their slot Night Roller. Managing to combine slots with Las Vegas, and plenty of dice rolling (though not of the Craps variety), players move around a board activating various features or prizes along the way. The ultimate goal is hitting the Spin-Out game where every spin guarantees some sort of modifier.

A drone’s eye view of Las Vegas has been used to background Night Rollers with the Bellagio fountains on the left, and Paris Las Vegas on the right. It takes more than just slapping on an image of one of the most epic party towns on earth to make an exciting game, yet you get the feeling this is exactly what Red Tiger tried to do in an attempt to mitigate Night Roller's lack of thrills. In the middle of the screen sits a 5-reel, 5-row grid, crisscrossed with 30 fixed paylines. Ringing the grid is the Feature Board, where a piggy bank icon traverses, awarding various payouts or features when the dice starts to roll. Night Roller is all a bit cheesy, a bit flashy; in short, it does its bit to uphold the tradition of these gaudy, naked wealth themed slots.

Bets is up first where stakes may be set from 10 p/c to $/€10 per spin on any device from smartphone to desktop. As for rest of the stats, Night Roller is not quite as grandiose as the theme suggests. For starters, default RTP clocks in at 95.68%, which is alright. Potential, meanwhile, is decent at 5,824 times the stake while volatility, in turn, is rated high. When modifiers are active, they apply to every single spin until they are changed, which sounds alright at first, but brace for a load of dead spins, which seems to be the way Red Tiger has compensated.

One possible reason why wins weren't overly frequent (in spite of the high hit rate) is that symbols land stacked - meaning they can get in each other's way on the archaic 30 payline win system. At least 3 identical symbols are needed to form a win, landing left to right from the first reel. Aside from the low-pay spades, diamonds, clubs, and heart, all are emblems of wealth. For high-paying symbols, we get wallets, stacks of cash, bags of cash, rings, and diamonds. For landing 5 premium symbols across the reels, players collect a win worth 0.9 to 2.5 times their stake. There is a wild symbol, but it is only available during the Life is Golden feature, covered below.

Night Roller: Slot Features

It couldn't be a board game without dice, which show up at random on the reels. When the dice symbol lands, it is rolled, and the piggy bank character moves around the Feature Board, framing the reels. If the piggy bank lands on one of the modifiers, they remain locked in place until it moves to a new modifier. The squares on the board award:

• Life is Golden – landing on the WILD position adds random wild symbols to every spin.
• Multipliers – land on an x2, x3, or x5 multiplier to increase the value of every win.
• Bombs Away! – all low-paying symbols are blasted off the reels.
• Coin It – coin positions award a single random instant prize win of 0.1 to 3 times the stake.

Landing on the Spin-Out square on the Feature Board awards 10 free spins. During free spins, a dice is rolled on every single spin, collecting each modifier it lands on. This means more than 1 feature can be activated, which all remain in play for the duration of free spins - any multipliers awarded are accumulated. Also, landing on the Spin-Out square again adds +5 free spins. Since the dice automatically rolls every spin, dice symbols do not appear on the reels during Spin Out.

Night Roller: Slot Verdict

All in all, Night Roller is an okay game that slides into the 'ostentatious display of wealth' slot category quite comfortably, despite the lagging gameplay. What differentiates Night Roller from others in this genre is the Feature Board which functions to an acceptable level but lacks the complexity of games like Prison Escape, Racetrack Riches, or even branded slot Jumani. Night Roller is lower key than those, which seems at odds with its Las Vegas setting.

There are some interesting points going on in Night Roller. Having alternating features keeps you guessing while injecting a random element into the game. However, after a while, Night Roller feels like you're stuck in a low-budget, non-branded version of Monopoly. That might make it suitable for board-gaming fanatics, but for others, it gets a bit repetitive. The awkward reels/payline setup doesn't help either, making it tough to string together matching symbols, resulting in swathes of dead spins, and lessening the potency of whatever modifier you may have activated. Free spins up the ante a notch, yet low symbol values step in to hinder their capabilities.

If you break Night Roller down numerically, what turns up doesn't make for encouraging reading either. Full screen wins, for example, max out at 75x for five stacks of diamonds, or 375x if that coincides with an x5 multiplier from the Feature Board. The stated potential isn't bad at 5,824x the bet, though when you see what you're working with, it's a bit of a tall order. Unless you're super excited by these slot/board game crossovers, it's unlikely Night Roller will be the massive night out it tries to portray.