Babylon Riches

Babylon Riches: Slot Overview

Find yourself playing a few online slots, and it probably won't take much time to gather stamps in your virtual betting passport from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. One cradle of civilisation which isn't as popular as those three but does crop up from time to time is that of Mesopotamia, an area situated in West Asia around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers system, from which flowered some of the world's earliest cities. Eridu, Uruk, Nineveh, Nippur, Assur, Akkad, the names themselves conjure up romantic images of the distant past and none more so than Babylon, of the Seven Wonders of the World Hanging Gardens fame. This famous city is the setting for casino game maker NetEnt's online slot Babylon Riches, a game that is hopefully as steeped in entertainment as it is in ancient history.

NetEnt has managed to squeeze quite a lot of neat references from the Babylonian era onto the screen to give that game a cultural flair. Eyes were drawn instantly to a pair of statues next to the gaming grid depicting those human-headed, bull-bodied (or lion), winged entities called Lamassu. It's said that the human head represents intelligence, the body of a bull equates to strength, and the wings refer to freedom. What more could you ask for? The rest of the screen shows things like columns, hanging gardens and so forth, and the overall effect is quite satisfying to the eye.

Babylon Riches is a slot that cycles through set numbers of spins in the base game before triggering certain effects on the final spin of the batch. It's played on 20 payline grid, made up of 5 reels and 3 rows. Mathematically medium-high volatile, a default RTP of 96.13% is the theoretical return value, while players are able to wager 10 c to $/€10 per spin.

Nine pay symbols appear on all of the reels, cut between common card suits - clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, and for the high pays, 5 Babylonian-inspired representations of animals. Hit a 5 OAK suit, and the payout is 1.3 to 3 times the stake. When landing 5 matching high pays, the awards are 4 to 50 times the bet. Wild symbols are able to help complete winning combinations, though they can only appear on the matrix from frame reveals.

Babylon Riches: Slot Features

As already noted, Babylon Riches' base game is played in batches of spins, in this case, sets of 8 spins. When a non-paying special symbol lands on the first 7 spins, it leaves a frame on its landed position, or it acts as a frame if it lands on the 8th spin. Special symbols only appear in the base game. On every 8th spin in the main game, all framed symbols or newly appearing special symbols transform into one of these:

• Regular Wild - wilds substitute for all regular pay symbols and are worth 50 times the bet for a 5 wild win line.
• Multiplier Wild - as well as substituting, these wilds have multiplier values of x2, x3, or x8, which apply to all winning combinations the wild is part of. If more than one multiplier wild participates in the same win, the multiplier values are summed before being applied.
• Symbol Multiplier - reveals a multiplier for the symbol that applies on all win lines the symbol participates in. The possible symbol multipliers which can be awarded are x4, x6, or x16. If more than one participates in a win, the values are summed before being applied.

Free Spins

Landing 2 scatter symbols on the leftmost and rightmost reels awards 8 free spins. Doing this while free spins are active awards a further +8 free spins. Frames from the main game do not transfer over to free spins. Instead, 2 to 8 frames appear on each spin, plus an additional cash prize worth up to 20x may be revealed, which is awarded no matter where the frame is. Symbols that have Cash Prizes on them can still create winning lines.

Babylon Riches: Slot Verdict

For whatever reasons, not a huge amount of developers have ventured forth into this part of the world to make their slots, compared to other more popular historical spots. Interestingly, NetEnt has done so before in Gods of Gold InfiniReels, a controversial slot that fuelled a brief beef between the studio and ReelPlay over the closeness of the two InfiniReels/Infinity Reels mechanics. In a happy ending, the issue was resolved amicably when the two companies entered an agreement over IP rights. Partner studio Red Tiger has also visited this zone via Age Of Akkadia, and we should include Push Gaming's elaborate release Wheel of Wonders in here too. Babylon Riches isn't as elaborate, mechanically, but it has something to offer players captivated by cyclical spin games.

Like the theme, these sorts of cycling slots aren't hugely numerous, but a few of them dot the gambling landscape. London Tube and Monsters Unchained are two examples; both are from Red Tiger, so maybe there was some influence on NetEnt or a sharing of experiences. Pragmatic Play got in on the action with Pinup Girls so there are options for this style of play floating about. There must be a crowd ready to play them, too, and Babylon Riches is likely to find a positive reception amongst certain players. The look is exotic, the frame revealed features aren't mighty innovators, but they aren't bad, and the max win is a tidy 7,250x the bet. It's unlikely to be as historically significant as the Babylonian king Hammurabi's Code, lex talionis and all that, but for some, Babylon Riches might make a certain mark.