Stadium of Riches

Stadium of Riches: Slot Overview

Football, or soccer depending on your country of origin, is the world's most popular sport with fan numbers estimated at 3.5-4 billion. Given the popularity, it's no wonder football has ended up theming quite a lot of slots, of varying degrees of quality. Now it's the time for software provider Play'n GO to lace up and have a kick about in the online slot Stadium of Riches. The studio has participated in the sport before via the wacky three-toed troll slot Hugo Goal, for example, but this time the team has chosen to follow closely, almost identically, to slots such as Rise of Merlin and Legacy of Dead.

Players view Stadium of Riches as if they are one of the crowd, sitting up in the stands as the action unfolds before them. It's an enthusiastic audience, fists raised in the air, constantly yelling about something. Since there's absolutely nothing happening on the actual pitch, the crowd must be laser-focused on symbols landing on the grid, and the music is equally, if not more, passionate about what's going on. Trigger free spins, and the camera angle shifts down to grass level. It's all pretty generic, and sorry to say, the creativity dial fails to tick even a single notch higher as we delve deeper into Stadium of Riches' workings.

Each click of the spin button sets a 5x3 matrix into motion and elicits a cheer from the roaring crowd. Built into the gaming area are 10 paylines, evaluating regular wins from the leftmost reel onwards. Players are able to select coin values of 1c to $/€2, 1 to 5 coins, and 1 to 10 active paylines. This equates to a total bet range of 1c to $/€100 per spin. Highly volatile (though this may vary depending on the number of lines activated), the highest of the five RTP variants is 96.58%.

Stadium of Riches does that old school, tad annoying thing, which measures the value of everything in coins. So, for the purposes of figuring out how much pay symbols are worth, let's assume we're betting 1 coin per spin. From bottom to top, we find 10 to A royals, whistles, gloves, balls, and boots, worth 80 to 5,000 coins for a 5 OAK hit. The trophy symbol is both wild and scatter. As wild, it replaces all paying symbols. Landing 3, 4, or 5 trophy symbols is also worth 2, 20, or 200 coins.

Stadium of Riches: Slot Features

Stadium of Riches' main feature is a free spins bonus round. Hitting 3 or more wild scatters triggers 8 free spins. Before they begin, a pay symbol is randomly selected to be the special expanding symbol. When the chosen symbols are in view, they're able to expand to cover the entire reels they are on. Expanded symbols pay all lines and do not have to be adjacent to one another or to start from the leftmost reel to do so. Hitting 3 or more wild scatters retriggers the feature and selects another pay symbol at random to also be a special expanding symbol. It is possible to activate up to 9 expanding symbols.

Gamble Feature

After a win, players may be presented with the option of gambling or collecting the dough. When gambling, it is possible to double or nothing by picking the correct colour of a downturned card, or quadruple or nothing when guessing the correct suit.

Stadium of Riches: Slot Verdict

Football might be the beautiful game, but it doesn't always translate to beautiful slots. Stadium of Riches is a prime example of this phenomenon. It's a game Play'n GO could have knocked out in its sleep, and after a few spins, you might be nodding off into a slumber of your own. Unless, perhaps, backwards thinking games are a personal forte. In which case, Stadium of Riches could be alright since it's built from slots that were released six or so years prior to this one. For others, well, Stadium of Riches is a generically presented rehash of some ancient mechanics that have received zilch in the way of modern upgrade or curious twist. Experienced gamblers will no doubt have seen all this sort of thing before. More than once.

On the positive side, let's dig deep, expanding pay from any reel symbols are proven crowd pleasers that have titillated players since around the dawn of online slots. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but the point stands. Rise of Merlin and Legacy of Dead expanded the popular mechanic by making it possible to have not one, not two, but up to nine expanding symbols running at the same time. Quite the coup when it first appeared, years ago, not so dazzling these days. Perhaps if Stadium of Riches had snuck any sort of newness in the genericism wouldn't have been so apparent. Alas, no.

Much else is expressed in coins, and so is the winning potential, where players have the chance of walking away with up to 250,000 of them (or 5,000x). Stadium of Riches wasn't great, and after a few kickabouts and the realisation of where it sits on the family tree, any desire to see out the full match significantly dwindled. How about we politely wrap up by saying if Stadium of Riches was a football team, it would not be up to Premier League standards.