The Grand Slot Review

Released in March 2019, you can play this game at online casinos such as PlayOjo, Mr Green or Rizk.

Theme and basic information

With The Grand we are getting an Art Deco theme. That’s not so much a theme but a type of look and design, mind you. It’s certainly very elegant, crisp and, indeed, grand-looking. The background music could be played in just about any cocktail lounge, where you go to chill with a sophisticated drink.

Still, whilst it looks elegant and definitely really good, it’s one of Quickspin’s less original and interesting slots in terms of theme.

The high-value symbols are artfully decorated gems in various colours as well as the card suit symbols (hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades). The green gem is the most valuable, paying out 8x our stake for 6 on a payline. The purple gem pays out 4x our stake for such a winning combination. The card suit symbols pay out 1x or 1.2x our stake for such a win.

All in all, we only get 6 different kinds of symbols here and they usually land stacked on the reels. Matching symbols on adjacent reel starting from the left-most reel will yield winning combinations on this 3x3x4x4x5x5 set of reels.

You can play this game from 0.10 to 100.00.

Random features in the base game

In the base game, three features can be randomly triggered. Here, only one of the features will ever be triggered at once:

• Sync – Usually, 2 reels of the same height are synced to enhance your chance at winning something. Most effective on reels 1 and 2.
• Wilds – between 4 and 8 wilds are randomly scattered around the reels.
• Nudge – 1 to 3 reels are nudged a position up or down to create better winning combinations.

Interestingly, we experienced the random wilds most often, followed by the Nudge feature. Our best wins in this game occurred with effectively placed wilds in the base game.

Lacklustre free spins despite great potential

You activate the free spins by landing at least 3 free spin symbols on the reels. Depending on the number of scatters, you’ll receive a corresponding number of spins. Free spin scatters can land on all six reels.

• 3 scatters give you 6 spins
• 4 scatters give you 9 spins
• 5 scatters give you 12 spins
• 6 scatters give you 15 spins

Mostly, you’ll get only 3 scatters and therefore only 6 spins. Depending on your luck, however, you might collect extra spins during the feature. Whenever three bonus symbols land on the reels (only on reels 3, 4 and 5, though) you the GRANDomizer appears and awards you one of the features above (Sync, Wilds, Nudge) plus 1, 2 or 3 extra spins.

The Sync on its own is almost useless in our experience. In combination with the Nudge, however, it can produce decent results. The Wilds are apparently harder to come by and we’ve only once experienced all three features together.

Conclusion: A slot that somehow fails to hit the mark

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of The Grand is 96.58%. That’s excellent value and unusually high for a slot as volatile as The Grand can be. On the whole, the theme and the features here go well together and if you’re lucky, you might experience a decent run here. Oddly, for the most part we had much better wins in the base game than during the free spins, even with two features active during the latter. It’s frustrating to only get 6x to 25x your stake back.

In the base game, however, we had several big wins of 50x our stake. Almost always extra Wilds were involved. The potential for everything to work out in your favour is there, especially with such an excellent RTP and we did manage to activate the free spins roughly ever 100 to 150 spins, which is very good indeed. But this game didn’t hit the sweet spot for us. It’s good enough for a little while and if you manage a decent win once or twice, we recommend you move on whilst you’re up. Chasing your losses here will probably be futile.