Timber is, of course, processed bits of wood used to build houses or fences and whatnot, but it's also apparently a word lumberjacks shout to warn other people of a tree about to topple over. It's the latter definition that seems to fit Timber Stacks, an online slot from Pragmatic Play, best. You won't see many planks of wood in this game, though you are likely to see stacks of symbols fall in a manner vaguely resembling the felling of a tree. This effect plays into an Increasing Grid Size feature, tumbles – of which there can be a lot, free spins, and various betting options.
The great outdoors is the setting for Timber Stacks. In a meadow bursting with daisies and long wavy grass where butterflies flit and bunnies bound about the place. It's a place where you lie down, maybe propped up against a log, then take in the towering trees and snow-capped mountains in the distance. At a guess, Timber Stacks reproduces a North American image, though maybe not, and players are free to pick anywhere rugged mountain terrain teems with the sorts of wild animals that appear on the game grid. Timber Stacks might not deliver the pinnacle of outdoor gambling from an audiovisual standpoint, but it does provide a very pleasing location to do a spot of gambling.
Kicking off the gambling starts by selecting a stake of 20 c to $/€240 per spin, and players have the choice of activating the ante bet, which ups the stake by 25% whilst doubling the chance of winning the free spins feature. Gamble with the ante bet on or off, or even buy free spins, and the default RTP remains steady at 96.05%. With a highly volatile math model, Pragmatic Play has rated 5 out of 5; Timber Stacks is played on a growable gaming grid where the default size is 5 reels and 5 rows.
Timber Stacks uses a ways system to evaluate wins, shooting off a payout when matching symbols land left to right on adjacent reels from the left-hand side. On the default grid, this means 3,125 ways to win are available. The tumble mechanic removes all winning symbols after they have paid and lets other symbols tumble downwards to fill the empty positions, creating a new chance to win. Tumbling continues until no more winning combinations appear on the screen, then awards the total of all wins. A total of ten pay symbols are in play here. These are 10-A card ranks as Timber Stacks' lows, then a fish, cougar, owl, bear, and wolf as the highs. Hitting a 5 OAK winning way pays 0.8 to 1 times the bet for the lows and 1.5 to 10 times the bet for the picture symbols. Landing on reels 2, 3, and 4, the wild helps connect wins by substituting for everything except the scatter.
Out here in nature, Timber Stacks' features are its increasing Grid Size, free spins, and bonus buy.
After each spin or tumble, if there are no more winning combinations on the screen, there is a chance that this feature triggers. When it does, an empty row of symbols is added to the bottom of the grid, and a random reel is chosen to fall. If reel 1 or 2 are selected to fall, all symbols from them fall to the right, adding their symbols from bottom to top in empty positions on the added bottom row. If reel 3 is selected, symbols from it fall either left or right, randomly, added symbols from bottom to top in empty positions on the bottom row. If reels 4 or 5 are chosen, symbols fall to the left, acting in a similar manner. After the fall, new symbols drop in from above to fill any empty positions. At its maximum size, the grid can be expanded to 10x5 where 100,000 ways to win are in play, and when tumbles end, the grid returns to the original 5x5 size.
The free spins round is triggered by landing 4 or 5 scatter symbols, awarding 8 or 10 free spins, respectively. During the free spins round, the Increasing Grid Size feature is available and behaves as it does in the base game.
Free spins may be bought for 120 times the bet. When buying free spins, 4 or 5 scatters will randomly land to trigger the feature.
As they are well adept at doing, the Pragmatic Play team has once again created a good-looking, nicely functioning online slot. One that doesn't shoot for superstar status, nor comes across in any way sub-par. The numbers are strong, the finish has been done to a satisfying standard, and the end result is tough to pick major holes in. If anybody has a talent for knocking out decent slots on a consistent basis, it's Pragmatic Play. No, Timber Stacks didn't feel destined to win awards any time soon, but neither is it likely to be ridiculed for being a boo game. All in all, dependable stuff.
What holds Timber Stacks back from being a better game are one or two things. One is that while the features it does have are totally fine at both triggering thrills and potentially big wins, something felt missing. If the Increasing Grid Size mechanic had been backed up with another supplementary feature, for instance, the extra variety would have been appreciated. Especially because when free spins trigger, nothing new is added there, nothing new occurs. On an anecdotal level, whilst the pay table did not specify this, it did seem more likely to trigger the Increasing Grid Size feature in free spins compared to the base game, which is a common move in slots. But since this isn't officially stated anywhere, maybe don't take it as a given. If a perceived lack of variety has you questioning the game's performance, there's no need to worry there since Timber Stacks has 10,000x the bet as a win cap.
It also packs in a lot of consecutive tumbling action. So, if you're a fan of symbols tumbling together to form lengthy chains of wins, then it might be worth giving Timber Stacks a go. On the whole, it's a pretty sweet game, and if slung against a wall, Timber Stacks would, for the most part, stick. It wouldn't have been terrible if Timber Stacks came with one or two little extras to spice things up, but what it has is able to construct moments of joy.
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