What are cluster pays wins?

Whenever you play a slot game, you will see some paylines involved in the format. Right? Well, no, that's incorrect. While many slot games do work on the paylines format, this doesn't apply to all of them. Some use a 'ways to win' method that gives you way more potential winning ways than paylines would. No doubt you have heard of 243 ways to win, for example.

And then there are cluster pays. Yep, just as you thought you knew how these slot games worked, another option is thrown into the mix. But we think you will like cluster pays wins, especially once you see how they work.

Identical icons must appear in clusters to win

Cluster pays is a term that gives away how it works. Instead of using paylines that run from left to right, you must find a cluster of identical symbols together. All the winning symbols must touch each other either vertically or horizontally. If one appears diagonally from the winning group, it is not counted in that group.

Points to note when playing slots with cluster pays involved

Normally, you will need to get four or five clustered icons to win a prize, rather than the three often seen in slot games. However, there is a chance to win much higher prizes because you will see bigger rewards the more icons you get in a cluster. It's possible to fill the screen with the same icon, triggering a prize for 25 or more matching icons in the cluster.

These games also tend to be bigger than standard slots. You will probably get a 5 x 5 grid at least, and it could be 6 x 6 or bigger. Compare that with a standard 5 x 3 game and you can see cluster pays do require more space to work properly.

Some games also make the winning clusters vanish when they have appeared. This allows new symbols to fall into position from above, with the chance of forming more clusters. If this occurs, you are sometimes given increasing multipliers the more clusters you get.

Try Aloha Cluster Pays to see whether you like this idea

Aloha! Cluster Pays introduced the idea of cluster wins to modern slot game. We can thank NetEnt for this one, but it has since been introduced by other software providers as well. We still think the Aloha slot is a great way to find out more about cluster wins, though!