About this game
Polar Glow is set on the sea ice: snowflakes, fish, seals and penguins lead to the 🐻❄️ polar bear. Five reels in a 5×3 window carry 10 fixed lines. The cool blue palette makes the golden 🌟 wild easy to spot.
💡 Tip: Open the paytable to see how far five 🐧 sit below five 🐻❄️ before you choose your credits per round.
How to play
- Open any Story Reels game; your balance starts at 1,000 virtual credits.
- Set Credits per round (default 5) with a quick button or by typing an amount; all 10 or 20 lines are always in play.
- Press SPIN and watch five reels settle into a 5×3 or 5×4 window.
- Matches of 3, 4 or 5 identical symbols count along a line from the leftmost reel; the 🌟 wild fills in for any symbol.
- Highlighted lines show what paid; the paytable pop-up and How to play are always one tap away.
The real numbers
Story Reels games return about 96% of the credits played over the long run. Lines pay for 3, 4 or 5 matching symbols starting on the leftmost reel, and the 🌟 wild can stand in for any symbol.
Every Story Reels game has a return rate of about 96%, so over a very long run roughly 960 of every 1,000 credits played come back and the built-in margin is about 4%. Why five reels? Each extra reel a match must cover multiplies the difficulty. If a symbol, wilds included, appears in a given position one time in five, then three or more in a row from the left happen 1 time in 125 on that line, four or more 1 time in 625, and all five 1 time in 3,125. That is why five-symbol matches carry the largest multiples in the paytable. Twenty lines check twice as many paths as ten, so hits come more often, but the long-run return stays the same. A 5×4 window holds 20 positions against 15 in a 5×3 window.
Rules
Each Story Reels game has five reels showing three or four rows, a 5×3 or 5×4 window. Ten or twenty fixed lines run across it in set shapes; they are always active, so you never pick lines yourself. A line pays when 3, 4 or 5 identical symbols sit on it in a row, starting from the leftmost reel. A match that begins on reel 2 does not count. The 🌟 wild substitutes for any symbol to complete a match, so 🦈 🌟 🦈 counts as three sharks. Only the longest match on each line is paid, and hits on different lines are added together. Every game has five regular symbols ranked low to high, plus the wild.
History
Video reels arrived in the mid-1970s. In 1976 the Fortune Coin Company put a machine into the Las Vegas Hilton that drew its reels on a modified 19-inch colour television instead of spinning metal drums; after security changes it was approved in Nevada, and IGT bought the company in 1978. The screen freed designers from the limits of three mechanical drums. Through the 1990s, first Australian and then American makers popularised five-reel layouts with many lines, and second-screen bonus rounds appeared in the second half of the decade. Themes grew into small stories, with characters, animated backgrounds and music. The wild symbol, which stands in for other symbols, became a standard part of the five-reel format.
Where it is popular today
Five-reel, multi-line games are the most common reel format today. They lead in Australia, where multi-line play took hold in the 1990s, and across Europe, including the Nordic countries, Germany and Poland, where they top mobile and social game collections. Their appeal is the theme: a reef, a starlit savanna or a night market can be told through symbols, colour and sound, so each title feels like a short picture story rather than a row of fruit.
Beginner’s guide
New to five-reel games? Think of a window with five columns, each one a spinning reel. After a spin, the game traces every fixed line from left to right and counts how many identical symbols sit on it in a row. Useful terms: a line is one path through the window; leftmost reel means a match must start in column one; the wild 🌟 is a joker that stands in for any symbol; the paytable lists each symbol's multiples for 3, 4 and 5 of a kind. All credits are virtual and free.
Did you know?
- The first video reel machine used a modified television set as its screen.
- A 5×3 window has 15 positions; a 5×4 window has 20.
- In Story Reels games a match must start on the leftmost reel; one that begins on reel 2 does not count.
- Second-screen bonus rounds became widespread in the late 1990s.