Played in demo · Play'n GO
Book of Dead, played in demo, and the one number its rules did not print
Book of Dead has been one of the most played slots in the world since its release in January 2016, and its mechanics have been copied so often that they now define a genre of their own, the "book" slots. We played the provider's demo and read its rules from top to bottom, and the most interesting thing we found was a figure not printed at all.
The game in one paragraph
Book of Dead (its full title is "Rich Wilde and the Book of Dead") is a Play'n GO video slot released on January 14, 2016. It has five reels and up to ten "paylines" (the lines across the reels on which symbols must line up, activated here in order from one to ten). The book (which the game's rules call a tomb) is both the "wild" and the "scatter", and three or more of them anywhere start the free spins.
We played the provider's "practice version" on November 12, 2026, with a demo balance of 25,000.00 and a stake of 1.00 a spin (five "coins" of 0.02 on each of ten lines). A registered Alberta site may run a different version, which matters on this page more than on any other, for a reason the rules screen makes plain.
- Provider
- Play'n GO, released January 14, 2016
- Reels and lines
- 5 reels, up to 10 lines, activated in order
- Stake in our session
- 5 coins of 0.02 on 10 lines, 1.00 a spin
- Free spins
- 3 or more books award 10, with one symbol chosen to expand; 3 or more during them add 10
- Scatter pays
- 3 books 2x, 4 books 20x, 5 books 200x the total stake
- Maximum win
- 250,000 coins at 50 coins staked, that is 5,000 times the stake
- Return to player
- not printed in the demo's rules or on the game's page
The expanding symbol
Before the free spins begin, the game picks one ordinary symbol at random to be the "expanding symbol" for the whole feature (any symbol except the book itself). During the spins, whenever that symbol can pay, it grows to fill every position on its reels in a single movement, and it pays on all ten lines even when the reels it occupies are not next to each other, which is a rare exception to the left-to-right rule.
That single rule is what gives the game its reputation. A free-spins round with a high-paying expanding symbol (the "explorer" himself, for instance) can produce wins far above the usual, while a round with a low card symbol can end with almost nothing, so the outcome of the feature is decided largely by a draw made before it begins; three more books during the spins add ten more.
The gamble, and what the rules say about it
After a win the player may "gamble" it, guessing the colour of a hidden card to double it (a fifty per cent chance) or its suit to quadruple it (twenty-five per cent), up to five times in a row and up to 2,500 coins. The rules state that the gamble "will not impact the overall RTP", and the arithmetic agrees, since a fair flip neither adds to nor subtracts from an expected value.
What the gamble does change is the spread of outcomes. A player who gambles every win turns a stream of small payouts into a series of all-or-nothing bets (double or nothing, five times over at most), which makes sessions shorter and more extreme without making them better; the rules also note that the gamble is switched off during "autoplay", and that autoplay itself "might be disabled in some jurisdictions or by operator choice".
The number the rules did not print
The rules screen of the demo we opened did not print a return to player, and neither did the game's page on the provider's site that day. No figure is therefore written here, and you would do well to distrust any page that quotes a single figure for this game without saying which version it describes.
The reason is not mysterious: providers commonly supply operators with several settings of the same game (one of the games we tested, Wanted Dead or a Wild, prints four of them side by side on its own page), so the return of a game in a particular lobby is the one printed in that lobby's rules screen, and nowhere else!
Our session
We played four spins at 1.00 and the balance moved from 25,000.00 to 24,998.00, a loss of 2.00 that tells nobody anything. The last spin brought a single book onto the fourth reel (see the screenshot above), however promising it looks, which looks like a beginning and is, for the purposes of the game, nothing at all, since one book pays nothing and starts nothing.
Four spins are not a test of a slot, and they are not presented here as one; what the session gave was the rules, read in full, and the screen as a player meets it, which is the part of the experience that a demo reproduces faithfully and a review can describe honestly.
On a registered Alberta site
If you play Book of Dead on a registered site, open the rules screen in that lobby before staking money and look for the return printed there. If none is printed, ask the operator's support team which version the site runs before you deposit anything, and keep the answer in writing, as we would, since a version can change without the game's name changing.
The other games we tested are on the games page in the same detail, the general mechanics of reels and lines are explained on how a slot decides, and the question of what a return figure means, and why one game can carry several, is the subject of the page on return to player.
By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026
