Joker's Jewels slot: 5 lines, one joker, 1040x at the top

The whole rulebook fits on one screen

The grid is 5x3 and symbols pay left to right along 5 lines that never move. Three of a kind is the shortest paying combination, five is the longest, and the line count stays where the studio fixed it. Nothing else on the screen gets a say.

• Card values: the floor of the paytable. A line of them barely dents the stake, which is rather the point - they are what you sit through while you wait for a face.
• Bells, hearts and the green gem: the middle of the paytable. There is no fruit anywhere on these reels, and a line of the middle three pays enough to hold a session level for another few spins.
• The crown and the red gem: the high end, and the pair that pays for an evening of card values.
• The joker: the top symbol, and he works alone. A line of jokers pays more than anything else in the table, and when he covers every cell of the grid the paytable has nothing above it left to pay: that picture is the ceiling.

A round here is over in about a second, and the jester laugh that lands on a win is the only thing the game does to celebrate. You set the stake once; after that the reels carry the whole evening.

RTP 96.50%, and the volatility line nobody printed

The passport above prints RTP 96.50% and leaves the volatility row empty, and the reason is duller than a mystery. Pragmatic Play does not rate volatility anywhere on its game pages: a studio passport there gives the return, the ceiling, the grid and the bonus symbols, and stops. Where a rating does turn up under this name in the catalogues, it belongs to Joker's Jewels Dice, which is a different game with dice on its reels. Borrowing that number would have been easy and wrong, so the row stays blank.

The paytable answers the question anyway, and it answers it in one shape: a steep top over a flat bottom. Card values pay pennies, the joker pays the ceiling, and almost the whole return sits in the two highest symbols. Read across the lines and you can see what that buys you - three of a kind on one of the 5 lines is the common event and barely moves the balance, while the line that pays for the last twenty spins has to come from the crown or the joker. Long quiet stretches, one loud arrival, and no rating needed to predict it.

RTP 96.50% is a middling figure for this lobby, and on a game with no features it is at least a transparent one: nothing is held back inside a bonus round you may never open.

The stake matters more than the return here. The smaller it is, the longer the quiet stretch can run before it hurts, and Vavada shows the borders inside the game window in your account currency.

The features players look for, and what the reels hold

The paytable carries the whole load, and the table below says exactly what that means for a player arriving from a game with a bonus buy button.

The ceiling sits in the open, and one picture pays it: the joker filling the whole grid. The spin history is the only record this game keeps - nothing banks, nothing accumulates, and whatever the last round did to the balance is already final by the time you look at it.

Minimum stake, long evening: how this card earns its shelf space

Vavada holds every deposit to a x3 turnover before the cashier lets it out, and that rule stands whether or not you touched a bonus. What closes that count quickest is a game with a one second spin and nothing between rounds, and this card sits about as close to that shape as the Hit tab gets. The 100 free spins handed out at registration spin at the minimum stake, and whatever they win carries a x20 wager before it turns into money. In a game with nothing to trigger, that count simply runs itself out.

The mistake I watch people make with this card is handing it bonus money. The x35 wager on a doubled first deposit counts slots only, and here the whole of that count has to be assembled out of line wins: no round to open, no multiplier to shorten it, just the paytable repeating itself until the number is met. The x3 an ordinary deposit carries is a completely different proposition on the same reels, and this card closes it about as fast as anything on the tab. It is worth knowing which of the two jobs you are asking of it before you press anything; while a bonus is running, the padlock on the game card marks whatever is closed for the duration.

I have had it the wrong way round, so this is not a lecture. Minimum stake, a bonus balance waiting to be turned over, and a run of card values long enough that I stopped reading the balance and started reading the tab beside it. The crowns did arrive. Set against what was still left to wager they were a rounding error, and the count underneath had barely moved.

Where to spin it at Vavada once the demo has bored you

The window above is Pragmatic Play's own launcher: the paid paytable, the paid generator, play money on the balance, no login. What it shows you is the gap - how long the card symbols keep the reels busy before a crown or the joker finally lines up. That gap is the entire game, and it behaves the same whether the balance is real or not. If it leaves you flat on play money, a deposit raises the stakes and changes nothing about the gap.

At Vavada the card sits in the Hit tab and opens with one button once you are logged in. Slot bets and sport bets both push the status ladder along, Beginner up to Platinum, and every step raises what you are allowed to take out in a day; the level itself is confirmed on the first day of each month. Close the x3 turnover and a payout runs from a few minutes to 24 hours. A free spins race is the one thing this card cannot enter, because points there are handed out for triggering free spins and there is nothing here to trigger. The X tournament will take it, and that is the whole of the good news. Places there go to whoever squeezes the biggest multiplier out of one spin anywhere in the lobby, open from Beginner upwards, and the leader when I checked stood at x25000 off a 0,56 USD stake. A card whose paytable stops at 1040x is not going to appear on that board on any evening you will ever have, so it belongs in the race only as whatever you happened to be playing - and lifting your stake to improve the odds of a placing improves nothing but the speed the balance leaves at. Terms for both sit on the bonuses page and the tournaments page.

Jokers, fruit or sevens: three cards off the same shelf

Two neighbors sit next to this one in the lobby, both of them built on a paytable and nothing else. Neither is described here by its figures - those belong to its own review - so the columns below are about what the reels do to an evening.

The rule I use: jokers when I want the cleanest spin in the lobby, the flaming seven when I want a wild doing some of the work, the cabinet game when I want the gamble button. Every card I have written up sits behind one link, the Vavada slots page.

Would I put money on jokers tonight?

Plain is the product, and that is the entire case for the card. It clears turnover at a speed nothing with a bonus round can match, and it has never once made me sit through an animation to find out what I won.

And it bores me. Both are true, and I have given up making them agree. What I remember from this game is not a win anyway: it is the jester laugh landing on a card-value line while the tab beside it was still loading something with a buy button. Make of that what you like. I still open it.