More From Nolimit City
Two rows above the reels start dark when Book of Shadows loads. Click them, and they light up. At 3 rows, you get 10 win lines at the base stake. At 4 rows, that becomes 15 lines for 1.5 times the stake, and at 5 rows, 20 lines for double it. The return climbs with each one, from 96.01% to 96.07% to 96.19%. That makes this Nolimit City slot one of the few where the player fixes the RTP before the reels turn, and free play is the cheapest way to feel the difference between the three settings.
The two upper rows are the game’s one purchase. Click either of them, or open the Nolimit Booster from the red lightning button, and the grid grows. Every added row brings 5 more win lines, so 3 rows run 10 lines, 4 rows run 15, and 5 rows run 20. The fourth row costs 1.5 times the base bet per spin and the fifth costs 2 times. Symbol pays don’t rise with that cost, because every win is calculated from the base bet, so what you’re buying is coverage and a better return rather than bigger individual prizes. The dark rows stay visible whatever you choose, and a Book landing in one of them counts for nothing.
The Book of Shadows symbol does two jobs. It substitutes for any other symbol and always completes the best combination a line can make, and 3 or more of it anywhere starts the free spins. It also pays on its own account, 500x for five, level with the witch at the top of the table.
Three Books start the round, and the row count you’re playing decides its length. At 3 rows, the award is 6 to 10 spins. At 4 rows, it is 8 to 12, and at 5 rows, 10 to 14. One symbol is drawn at random as the Golden symbol before the spins begin, and you may reshuffle that draw once. The Golden symbol then expands across its whole reel, over the active rows, whenever those extra positions can complete a win. Nolimit City puts the strategy in the rules instead of leaving you to work it out. Reshuffle unless the draw is one of the five top payers, and keep the same number of rows you triggered with. Three more Books during the round retrigger it.
Any win can go to a card gamble for double or nothing. Choose red or black, double the win or lose it, or collect at any moment. The run is limited to 5 gambles in a row, and free spin winnings can be gambled as well. Collecting ends the round and returns you to the reels.
Most of what this studio has released since pays on ways counts and stacks its x-features onto the reels, with a five-symbol top pay of a few x. Book of Shadows does none of that. Ten fixed lines, a 500x top line, and one wild that also triggers, from August 2020, two years before Nolimit City joined Evolution. The horror art places it beside Mental in a range that has since filled with ways games, and the Nolimit City catalogue shows how far the studio travelled from this format after 2020.
Nothing about a spin changes until you decide how many rows you’re paying for. The two upper rows start dark; clicking one activates it and increases the cost of the next spin. Lines are read from the left, and each active line keeps only its best result, so the extra rows earn their cost by adding lines 11 to 20 rather than by making any single line richer. At 5 rows, the board is a full 5×5 with 20 lines live.
The row toggles are the control that matters, and they’re on the board itself rather than in a menu. The red lightning button on the right opens the Nolimit Booster, which shows both row prices in a panel. The coin button opens the full bet ladder, the star opens the feature panel, and the burger button covers the game menu, round history, and settings. Music, sound effects, and a spacebar spin toggle are the only settings, and there is no turbo option. After a win, the spin button becomes a collect-and-spin icon, so one press banks the win and starts the next round.
The bet ladder runs from €0.10 to €100, before you add a row cost on top. Each extra row lifts the return by a few hundredths of a point, and the FAQ below lists the three figures. A round ends the moment it reaches 30,338 times the bet, which is the most Book of Shadows will pay.
Nolimit City marks the game Extreme on its own volatility scale; High is the tier it takes here. Both readings suit a slot that pays on 33.33% of spins. One paying spin in three sounds generous until you read the table underneath it, because most of those hits are two or three card ranks worth a fraction of the bet. The 500x line and the free spins carry everything above that, and they arrive rarely enough to make the row decision the main thing you control.
Two-symbol pays are limited to the five picture symbols, so the card ranks start at 3. The witch and the Book both finish at 500x for five, and the fall from five symbols to four is steep the whole way down.
| Symbol | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book of Shadows | – | – | – | 500x |
| Witch | 1x | 2x | 10x | 500x |
| Pink cat | 0.5x | 1.6x | 9x | 150x |
| Ram skull | 0.4x | 1.4x | 8x | 100x |
| Green moth | 0.3x | 1.2x | 7.5x | 75x |
| Eye potion | 0.2x | 1x | 7x | 50x |
| A | – | 0.8x | 6x | 25x |
| K | – | 0.8x | 6x | 20x |
| Q | – | 0.5x | 5x | 15x |
| J | – | 0.5x | 5x | 12.5x |
| 10 | – | 0.5x | 5x | 10x |
Six years on, the row switch is still what separates this one from every other Book game. Nolimit City built a return the player sets and then handed over the strategy that goes with it. The art and the 500x top line are conventional format parts, and the row purchase carries the game.
Eighteen hundredths of a percentage point separate this game’s lowest return from its highest, and a button on the board decides which one you’re playing. Nolimit City handed that decision to the player in 2020 and then wrote down how to make it.
The maths is worth doing before you toggle anything. Doubling the stake for a fifth row buys 10 extra win lines and 0.18 percentage points of RTP, which is not much on the numbers alone. What the extra rows really buy is frequency and a longer bonus. Twenty lines find combinations that three lines of card ranks never would, and a trigger at 5 rows awards 10 to 14 free spins instead of 6 to 10. That is the case for paying more per spin, and it has little to do with the RTP figure.
The art has aged well. The witch, the pink cat, and the ram skull are drawn in the same red and violet ink as this studio’s later horror titles, and the reels stand in a dead wood full of skulls. Six years on, it still reads as a Nolimit City game.
There is a fair objection. Strip the row switch out, and this is a 2020 Book game built from stock parts: an expanding symbol drawn at random, a wild that doubles as the scatter, a retrigger, and a 50/50 gamble, none of which Nolimit City invented. There are no x-features, and a player arriving from the studio’s recent releases will find this board sparse. The 500x top line reads big only because the ways games that followed pay a few x for five of their best symbol.
What keeps the rating up is that the one new idea is good and has been worked through completely. The cost, the line count, the return, and the bonus length all move together with the rows, and the game tells you which setting to keep during free spins. That is rare enough that this review would send you through a few demo rounds at each setting first.
