This post was published in July 2018 and introduced three slot releases that were new at the time: Robin of Sherwood, Fortunium and Jumanji. It is kept at its original address, with the descriptions corrected and the claims that could not be checked removed. Treat it as a record of what these three games were, not as a recommendation, all three are now several years old, and availability differs by market.
Robin of Sherwood
Built by Rabcat and distributed through Microgaming’s network, Robin of Sherwood runs on a five-reel, three-row grid with 243 ways to win, meaning any matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left count, regardless of the row they land on. There are no fixed paylines to select, so the stake covers the whole grid.
Its distinguishing feature is a randomly triggered wild transformation: the outlaws fire on one or more reels and convert the royal card symbols there into wilds before the win is evaluated. It fires in the base game rather than only in the bonus, which is what keeps the base game from feeling flat between features. A free-spins round sits behind three or more scatters.
Fortunium
Fortunium is a Just For The Win title, also distributed by Microgaming, with a steampunk setting: brass, gears and a Victorian-industrial palette rather than the medieval one above. Mechanically it is the more unusual of the two: the reels are split, with a smaller set stacked above a larger one, and symbol positions unlock as matching symbols land, so the number of ways to win expands during a sequence instead of staying fixed.
That mechanic, a grid that grows while a win is being resolved, was still relatively new in 2018 and has since become common across studios.
Jumanji
NetEnt’s Jumanji is a licensed title, a 2017 adaptation of the 1995 adventure movie Jumanji, and the first cast photograph that set the tone for it appeared while that film was in production. The game is structured as a board game: a physical-looking board occupies the centre of the screen, and rolling advances a token around it between spins, which is what carries the theme rather than the reels themselves.
Four bonus rounds sit on the board, one for each of the film’s environments, and random features fire in the base game, a wild that duplicates itself, and a re-spin that keeps only matching symbols. It is the most heavily licensed of the three, and licensed slots tend to have shorter availability windows than original titles because the licence itself expires.
What the three have in common
All three arrived in the same eighteen months, and they show the same shift: the interesting part of a 2018 slot had moved from the paytable to the mechanic. A decade earlier a new title differed from its neighbours mainly in artwork and in how many paylines it offered; by 2018 the differences being sold were structural, and all three of these carry one. Robin of Sherwood transforms symbols before a win is evaluated, Fortunium expands the grid while a sequence resolves, and Jumanji moves a token around a board that sits outside the reels entirely.
That matters for reading any games post, including this one. The mechanic is the part worth describing because it is what a player actually experiences, and it is also the part that does not change after publication. The numbers around it (bonus size, availability, the operators carrying the title) were already unreliable when this was written and are worthless now.
What dates a slot review
Three things in a post like this one go stale, and they are worth separating from the parts that do not. The mechanics (grid size, ways to win, how a feature triggers) do not change; a description written in 2018 is still accurate today. Availability changes constantly, because distribution deals and market licences move. And any figure attached to a bonus or a promotion is worthless within months.
That is why the descriptions above have been kept and every “available now at” claim has been dropped. For how the underlying maths of these games works, the overview of the game categories is the place to start.
Questions
Are these three games still playable?
Availability depends on the market and the operator, and licensed titles in particular are withdrawn when the licence behind them lapses. This post is a description of what the games were in 2018 and does not track where they can be played now.
What does “243 ways to win” mean?
That matching symbols count whenever they land on adjacent reels starting from the leftmost one, in any row. There are no paylines to choose, and 243 is simply the number of possible combinations across a five-reel, three-row grid.
Does a licensed slot pay differently from an original one?
Not as a rule. The licence affects the artwork, the sound and the cost of producing the game, not the return-to-player figure, which is set in the paytable and published per title.
Who built each of the three?
Robin of Sherwood is by Rabcat and Fortunium by Just For The Win, both distributed through Microgaming; Jumanji is NetEnt’s. The studio that builds a game and the network that distributes it are frequently different companies, which is why the same title appears at operators that look unconnected.