Look at the box art on almost any Megaways slot and you will see the number before you see anything else. It reads like a marketing flourish, but it is a real output of the mechanic doing its job. Big Time Gaming built the system in 2015 for Bonanza, and licensed it out afterwards to Blueprint, Pragmatic Play, Inspired and a dozen others. The number itself is not fixed. It is recalculated every spin, and that is the part worth taking apart.
Reels That Reshuffle Their Own Height
A standard slot has a fixed grid: five reels, three rows, done. Megaways reels do not hold still. Each of the six reels can independently display anywhere from two to seven symbols on a given spin, decided by a random reel modifier that runs before the visuals load. Multiply the possible symbol counts across all six reels and you land on the maximum of 117,649, but only on the spins where every reel happens to max out. Most spins land somewhere lower, which is why the “ways” count keeps changing between drops.
Cascading reels sit on top of that. Winning symbols clear instead of the reels re-spinning, new symbols drop from above to fill the gaps, and any new matches pay again from the same wager. Chain enough cascades together during a bonus round and the multiplier trail that has been quietly climbing in the corner starts doing real work.
The mechanic itself is licensed, not open, which is why it looks slightly different depending on who built the game. Big Time Gaming’s own titles tend to keep the reel-height randomiser front and centre with minimal extra features layered on. Studios paying for the licence (Pragmatic Play has put out more Megaways titles than anyone else over the past year) usually bolt on their own bonus structures around the same core reel-count randomiser. That is how two Megaways slots can share the maths and still play completely differently.
The RNG Doing The Counting
None of that reel-height randomness happens by hand-waving. It is a pseudo-random number generator producing the values that decide reel heights, symbol positions, and cascade outcomes, seeded and reseeded continuously so results cannot be reverse-engineered from previous spins. Turbogeek has covered this before: random number generators are the part of a slot that never actually stops running, producing values whether or not anyone is playing, with RTP calculated as a completely separate long-run statistic rather than something the RNG itself outputs.
There is a deeper infrastructure question underneath this too: is the generator seeded with genuine entropy instead of a predictable clock value? We went into that when looking at the server-side plumbing behind online casino platforms, including why some operators still lean on physical entropy sources to avoid seed prediction attacks.
Why The Volatility Swings So Hard
This is where Megaways earns its reputation as a high-variance format, and also where the numbers vary across titles. A running, UK-licensed list of Megaways slots is a useful reference here, since RTP and volatility ratings shift release to release enough to change what a “big win” actually looks like in practice. A low-variance outlier sitting in the mid-90s pays modestly but often, while the high-variance titles can go cold for long stretches before a cascade chain with a stacked multiplier clears in one hit. Gonzo’s Quest Megaways currently sits at the top of the RTP charts at just over 98%, while most of the pack lands several points lower.
The reel-height randomiser is partly responsible: a spin where several reels max out at seven symbols does not just multiply the ways to win, it also widens the gap between an ordinary result and a genuinely large one. Free spin rounds tend to lock in a multiplier that only increases, never resets, for the duration of the round. String together four or five cascades with that multiplier climbing and the payout curve stops looking anything like a standard five-reel slot’s paytable. Across current UK-licensed releases, RTP sits anywhere from the low 94s up past 98%, and roughly two in three new titles launch rated as high volatility rather than medium or low.
Independent Testing Keeps The Maths Honest
None of this is verifiable by eye, which is exactly why the testing sits outside the studios. Certification and RTP verification for UK-facing titles go through independent labs before a slot is allowed to launch, and operators serving UK players hold a licence from the Gambling Commission, which sets the technical standards those labs test against. It is a genuinely different regime from crypto-only casinos running unaudited “provably fair” claims with no independent check at all.
None of the maths above changes the basic advice, though. These are high-variance products that produce long dry spells punctuated by outsized wins, and it is worth being honest with yourself about that pattern. GambleAware’s free helpline and self-assessment tools are there for anyone in Great Britain who wants a second opinion on their own play. Nobody is judging.
Megaways is not the only reel innovation slots have tried in the last decade, but it is one of the few where the number on the box, the RNG behind it, and the lab that signed off on both actually line up.
