Cluster Tumble

Theme and Design

Help Rescue An Intrepid Explorer From a Mountain Temple

This is a true adventure slot with a cool back story and fantastic production. Cluster Tumble is based amidst a kind-of Himalayan backdrop with one explorer gone missing and his equally gung-ho wife on the chase to find out what has happened to him. You’ll get all that from the intro video.

The game action unfolds in Mayan-style temple with lots of weird looking masks and carvings building an eerie atmosphere. The surroundings also feature gold statues to the sides of the screen and skulls strewn on the ground. Despite the dramatic storyline the initial vibe once you start playing is very chilled with a relaxing soundtrack to accompany your spins. If you clear the board and enter the free spins round the action takes you inside the underground part of the temple where the lost explorer can be seen, caged-up for some reason. When the round ends they head off together, clutching a pile of treasures.

It’s a neat story and a quality production.

RTP and Variance

The base game RTP rate for this slot is 96.4% but that figure can rise to 96.57% during the uber-volatile Free Spins round. And for those interested in the stats side of things, Relax also advertise the hit frequency of the game as 20.29% which means you should hit a win roughly once every 5 spins.

The volatility of the game is very high so it will likely produce a very uneven win distribution. That means it can burn down your balance fast at times so choose your stake setting with care.

Maximum Win

The max payout from one spin in Cluster Tumble is 20,000x. That’s good potential. You can find even better from the same provider in our list of Relax slots with highest max wins.

Symbols and Paytable

The game plays on an 8x8 grid and pays out for ‘clusters’ of 4 or more identical symbols that land in adjacent positions horizontally or vertically.  You can build huge clusters of 40 or more pay symbols for big wins.

There are just six symbols in the table. They are three gems – blue, green and red - valued at from 0.3x for 4 blue up to 50x for 40 or more red; and a blue mask, a scarab beetle and a red mask, valued at from 0.4x for 3 blue masks up to 2,000x for 40 or more red masks!

There is also a wild, represented by the letter W, that substitutes for any pay symbol to complete a cluster.

Features and Gameplay

Stone Blocks, Cluster Pays and Cascades

Cluster Tumble is not quite like other cluster pays slots. When the game starts you’ll notice that only 10 to 15 positions on the grid have pay symbols on them. The rest are taken up by stone blocks.  These stone blocks are removed when symbols in clusters appear in positions next to them.

And, when clusters form, a cascade is triggered, which means symbols in the cluster explode off the grid and ones above drop down to fill the spaces. New symbols also drop in from above to fill the remaining empty spaces. If more clusters are formed, the process repeats, and any stone blocks appearing next to new clusters are removed as well.

Gradually, with each successive cascade, more of the grid opens up. The aim of the game is to remove ALL stone blocks from the grid. When you do, then the free spins round is triggered.

As well as those cascades, you also have some nifty modifiers to help you. These appear in the stone blocks and only activate when those blocks are removed. They are as follows:

Lightning Win

Stone blocks with a lightning symbol can transform into paying symbols when activated by a cluster. Now, after the next cascade, all instances of this symbol are removed from the grid whether they are in a cluster or not.

Fire Transform

Stone blocks with fire symbols can transform into a random paying symbol, with 1-2 other blocks becoming the same symbol in the next cascade to increase your chances of creating clusters.

Wilds

Stone blocks with wild symbols in them will transform into Wilds to help create clusters.

Free Spins

Clearing the grid of stone blocks triggers the free spins round. You can also trigger it by landing 3 scatters – the gold emblem. You get 5 free spins and if you can clear the board again, you’ll get another 3, plus a 3x multiplier. Do it again, and you get 3 more spins and a 6x multiplier. And so on …

Finally, if you land a scatter at any point during free spins then you will earn an extra free spin.