Theme & Design

Spooky Goings-On In This Haunted Slot Game

A classic old skool cartoon-style haunted house is the setting for The Ghost Father. By the looks of things, this is a home steeped in family heritage, as generations-past stare down from old portraits hanging on the walls. The scene is spookily lit by flickering candles jammed into old wine bottles whilst cobwebs and creaking floorboards complete the picture. The design style is classic Peter and Sons, with plenty of quirkiness, humour, and tons of personality. The story goes that those ghosts, including patriarch, Igor Vasilievich, are fighting over the family heirlooms even in the afterlife, so it’s your job to relieve them of their cumbersome wealth! Keep reading to find out how.

RTP and Variance

The Ghost Father has been created with 3 available RTP settings – 96.3%, 94%, 90.5% and 86%. This is not uncommon with slots developers today, leaving it to the casino operators to decide what house edge they want to take. You should always try to play at the optimum RTP level – in this case 96.3% – to give yourself the best chance of a positive return on your wagering. I recommend playing at Casumo or Barz Casino (a White Hat Gaming site) which usually offer slots at the top RTP rates.

This is also a volatile slot, so expect an uneven distribution of wins. It’s all about those big moments, driven by the free spins-multiplier combos in the bonus round explained below.

Maximum Win

The top payout available on The Ghost Father is 10,000x. That would give you a £1,000 win from a 10p stake. This is about standard for Peter and Sons games. On occasion they produce slots with a 20,000x max, but that is the exception rather than the rule. If you want better potential from your slots try our list of the highest max win slots with wins of 100,000x and more!

Symbols and Paytable

The Ghost Father is played on a simple 5 reel and 3 row game area with 20 paylines to trigger wins on. You’ll need to land 3 or more identical symbols across a line from left to right, starting at the left most reel, to score a payout.

The pay table has higher than average symbol values. At the low end are the four cards – Jack, Queen, King and Ace – valued at up to 15x for 5 Aces. The premiums are the family of ghosts themselves, valued at up to 100x for five on a line.

There are also Wilds which will substitute for any pay symbol to complete a payline. However, they only appear in the free spins round where they come with multipliers, or when the Golden Bet feature is activated for enhanced odds. More on that in the next section.

Features and Gameplay

The Ghost Father is not a hugely complicated game. It’s all about hitting the free spins where you can start activating and collecting the values of Ghost Symbols as well as unlocking multipliers to boost your payouts.

Ghost Symbols and Wilds

During both base game and free spins round you will see special Ghost Symbols land on the reels each carrying a cash value of between 1x and 1,000x.

In order to reap the values of these symbols you will need to land at least one Wild at the same time. However, because Wilds are not normally active in the base game, you can only collect the Ghost Symbol values during the free spins feature.

Free Spins And Boosters

How do you unlock the free spins feature? That’s simple. You need to land at least 3 scatter symbols ANYWHERE on the reels in one spin. When 3, 4 or 5 scatters land you get 7, 9 or 12 spins.

Ghost Symbols may carry Boosters with them, displayed as hearts, spades and diamonds, which correspond with the three meters that appear above the grid.  Each time one of the boosters appears, another position on the relevant meter lights up. The three meters are:

• Free Spins – filling the meter with the 3 spades unlocks 3 more free spins.
• Multipliers – filling the meter with the 3 hearts adds multiplier values to wilds. These multipliers apply to any win that passes through the wild and also to Ghost Symbol values.
• Ghost Rain – filling the meter with the 3 diamonds adds up to 7 extra Ghost Symbols onto the reels at once (these ghosts do NOT have boosters).

Peter and Sons have also built in a couple of extras that give you extra chances of landing Ghost Symbol wins as well.

Firstly, if a Wild lands on its own with no Ghost Symbols to collect, then the Ghost Rain may randomly trigger to add Ghost Symbols to the reels. Alternatively, if SIX of more Ghost Symbols land when there is no Wild in view, their values MAY just randomly be collected anyway.

Golden Bet

You can also play The Ghost Father with the special Golden Bet feature activated. This costs 150% of your standard bet – so £1 becomes £1.50. In this case, wilds can land on base game spins, giving you the chance to collect Ghost Symbol values in that phase of the game too.

The Final Verdict

With the cash collect feature as the main event here, Peter and Sons are not exactly breaking new ground with The Ghost Father. There are so many of these slots dropping right now it’s hard to keep up. From the Big Bass series to the latest Genie Jackpot release, as well as Quickspin’s Brawlers Bar, it’s definitely the feature of the moment.

Cash collect’s popularity arises because when done well, it’s a compelling format. And in The Ghost Father, it’s done really well. As well as having a cool and fun theme, with typically quirky narrative and design, there are enough element of originality in the gameplay to make you feel like you are playing something brand new. In particular the booster features that come with the Ghost Symbols add a nice progressive element to the free spins round, and the random Ghost Rains that trigger when a lonely wild lands it typical of the surprises that this slot springs on a regular basis.

The 10,000x max win could be higher, but it remains competitive and with a solid optimum 96.3% RTP and 21.6% hit rate, this is a nicely balanced slot too.

In short, The Ghost Father is another fine addition to the unique portfolio of an excellent game studio.