Deadwood

Nolimit CityRTP 96.03%Volatility HighMax Win 13,950x4.2 out of 5
DeadwoodNolimit City
Deadwood reels with two Scatter buffalo skulls on the middle reels

Deadwood Stats

RTP96.03%
VolatilityHigh
Max Win13,950x
Paylines576 ways
Reels5 reels
Bet Range€0.20 – €100
Bonus RoundYes
ScattersYes
ProviderNolimit City
ReleasedMay 2020
✓ Verified in-gameSee the rules screens
RTP & Maths
RTP by Mode
96.02% with Gunslinger Spins, 96.03% with Hunter Spins
RTP Versions
96.03% here · Other versions 94.15%, 90.13%
Hit Frequency
40.17
Max Win Probability
1 in 10,000,000,000 rounds
Max Win Rule
13,950x the bet, simulated maximum payout for one round
Free Spins & Bonus
Free Spins
3 Scatters = 8 free spins, player's choice of Hunter Spins or Gunslinger Spins; 2 Sheriff Badges + 3 Scatters = 10 Shoot Out free spins · Retrigger: Each Sheriff Badge landing on reel 1 or 5 during free spins awards +1 spin
Multipliers
X1-x4 on a single nudging Hunter Wild; several Wild multipliers add together; Gunslinger Spins multiplier is unlimited and sticky for the whole feature
Symbols & Pays
Wild
Fills in for every symbol other than the Scatter and the Sheriff Badge; takes the highest possible winning combination · Reels 2, 3 and 4
Ways Pays
Top symbol 3.75x · Lowest 0.05x
About Game

Demo Overview

Two spins in five pay something here, and that isn’t an accident of the art. Deadwood uses 576 ways over a 5-reel board that goes 3-4-4-4-3, and its frontier symbols are built to land in small handfuls rather than rare ones, with 40.17% of spins returning a win. You’ll collect a lot of 0.15x and 0.25x hits while you wait for the Hunter Wild to nudge into view. That trade, steady small pays against a Wild that stacks multipliers, is what this Nolimit City western was designed around.

Gameplay Options

The Hunter Wild

The Hunter Wild is four rows tall and shows up on reels 2, 3, and 4 only. When part of him lands off screen, he nudges until the whole cowboy is in view, and every step of that nudge adds one to the win multiplier, so one Wild carries anything from x1 to x4.

Land two or three at once, and their multipliers add together into a single figure applied to the win. The Wild fills in for every paying symbol, though not the Scatter or the Sheriff Badge, and it always takes whichever combination pays most.

Sheriff Badges and Shoot Out

Deadwood pay table showing gold bars, pocket watch, money painting, whiskey, shotgun and the card rank symbols
Gold bars head the set at 3.75x for five, with the pocket watch, money painting, whiskey and shotgun behind them and the beaten-up card ranks stopping at 1.25x. Shoot Out turns that bottom row Wild across the middle reels.

Badges land on reel 1 and reel 5, nowhere else. Get one on each in standard play, and Shoot Out fires, turning every low symbol on the three centre reels into a Wild for that spin. On a 576-way board, that separates a dead screen from a paying one.

The Scatter Choice

Three Scatters award eight free spins, and the game hands you the call on which eight. Gunslinger Spins or Hunter Spins, and the two play nothing alike.

Gunslinger Spins

Pick Gunslinger, and the win multiplier goes sticky for the whole feature. Every nudge step of a Hunter Wild raises it by 1, every extra Wild that lands raises it by 1 again, and nothing caps where it finishes. None of it resets between spins, so the multiplier creeps upward all round and either arrives late or doesn’t arrive. Its own card carries the Extreme label.

Hunter Spins

Hunter Spins is the steadier eight. A Hunter Wild drops on every single spin, so each one comes with a multiplier of at least x1 attached to whatever it makes. The rules back this route, grading it a hundredth of a point above the Gunslinger version, and its card reads High rather than Extreme.

Badges in the Bonus

Sheriff Badges keep working inside both modes. Each one that lands on reel 1 or reel 5 awards an extra spin, and landing both on the same spin locks them there, turning the round into Shoot Out Gunslinger Spins or Shoot Out Hunter Spins, with the centre reels’ low symbols acting as Wilds on every spin. Two badges alongside three Scatters in standard play skip you straight to that version, with 10 spins instead of eight.

Where the Sequel Went

Deadwood came out in May 2020, two years before Evolution bought the Stockholm studio, and it’s the release that made xNudge a signature. The 2024 follow-up, Deadwood R.I.P, narrows the board to 3-4-4-4-2 and 384 ways and raises the cap to 100,000x, which makes it a rarer, heavier game. This one kept the wider board and the friendlier rhythm, and you can compare it with the rest of the range on our Nolimit City hub.

How to Play

Picking Your Eight Spins

Deadwood base game reels with a four-row Hunter Wild on reel 3, a Sheriff Badge on reel 1 and a Scatter on reel 4
576 ways across 3-4-4-4-3 rows, with a Sheriff Badge parked on reel 1, a full-height Hunter Wild at x1 on reel 3 and a buffalo-skull Scatter one reel along. Two more Scatters and the choice of eight spins opens.

The choice between Gunslinger Spins and Hunter Spins is the only decision Deadwood asks of you, and it moves the return. Hunter Spins is the route the rules recommend at 96.03%, while Gunslinger Spins settles at 96.02% and trades that hundredth for a multiplier that sticks and never stops climbing. There are 576 ways instead of lines, so matching symbols on neighbouring reels pay wherever they are in their rows, and a nudging Wild multiplies whatever they make. If you’d rather not keep clicking through free play, the settings panel lets you hand spinning duty to the spacebar.

RTP and Bet Values

The demo is the full-return build. Rounds are priced from €0.20 to €100. Some sites run the game at lower returns, and the spread between the best and the weakest of them is wide, 96.03% down to 90.13%. A single round stops at 13,950x.

Nolimit City grades this one Extreme for volatility, and the free-spin cards grade themselves: Hunter Spins High and Gunslinger Spins Extreme. We have it as High, and the 40.17% hit rate is why. A board paying two spins in five isn’t starving you between features; what’s extreme is the distance between a 0.05x card-rank hit and what a sticky multiplier does with eight spins of nudging Wilds. Both labels describe the same board from opposite ends.

Symbol Payouts

Five gold bars is the biggest row in the table at 3.75x, and the five card ranks are nearly flat below it, 1.00x to 1.25x for five. Neither the Scatter nor the Sheriff Badge has a row of its own.

Symbol 3 4 5
Gold bars 0.25x 0.75x 3.75x
Pocket watch 0.2x 0.6x 3x
Money painting 0.2x 0.6x 2.5x
Whiskey 0.15x 0.5x 2x
Shotgun 0.15x 0.5x 1.5x
A 0.1x 0.35x 1.25x
K 0.1x 0.35x 1.25x
Q 0.05x 0.25x 1x
J 0.05x 0.25x 1x
10 0.05x 0.25x 1x

Ultimate Slots Verdict

What holds up here is the decision at the Scatters and the way several nudging Wilds stack into one multiplier instead of cancelling each other out. Eight spins is a small allowance, so the Hunter route with a guaranteed Wild each time makes more sense than the sticky alternative for most sessions, and the rules agree. The board pays often and pays small, which suits free play better than it suits impatience. Five years of Nolimit City releases have gone bigger; almost none of them are this easy to sit with.

4.2/5 Excellent

✓ What We Like

  • The bonus is a real choice, and the two modes play nothing like each other
  • Several Hunter Wilds add their multipliers together rather than replacing one another
  • Shoot Out turns the middle reels' low symbols Wild, and a locked pair of badges repeats it every spin

✗ What Could Be Better

  • Five of the top symbol pays 3.75x, so standard play deals in fractions
  • There's no bet booster or feature buy, so the bonus only arrives when three Scatters do

Detailed Review

Our Deadwood Demo Experience

Why play a 2020 slot when the studio behind it has spent five years making louder ones? Because the rhythm here still works. Most spins give you something back, the wait for three Scatters is short by the standards of what came after, and the feature that carries the whole design is on screen constantly rather than locked behind a bonus.

The art helps. A saloon board advertising the best porkchops west of New York is beside the reels, gold bars and a money painting glint against beaten-up card ranks, and the Scatter is a buffalo skull with a pair of revolvers crossed behind it. It’s a Wild West setting played straight, with none of the gore the studio leaned into later, and it holds together five years on better than most 2020 releases do.

What makes it hold up is the maths on the Wild. One nudging cowboy is worth up to x4, and because several of them add rather than overwrite, a board with two or three Hunter Wilds turns an ordinary 0.6x into something four or five times larger. Every later xNudge title in the studio’s catalogue is a variation on what this game worked out first.

Shoot Out is the other reason the board never feels idle. Two badges on the outside reels hand the three middle ones a screen of Wilds, and since the badges lock in place once a free-spin round upgrades, that screen repeats for the rest of the eight or ten spins. It’s a crude effect next to the enhancer grids and split reels the studio designs now, and on a board this wide, it’s still the most productive thing that can happen without a multiplier attached.

The numbers themselves are the weak point. Five gold bars pays 3.75x, so standard play is a run of fractions, and the frequent wins that make the rhythm pleasant are exactly the wins that don’t move a balance far. Choosing Gunslinger Spins costs you a hundredth of a percent for a multiplier most rounds never get time to grow. For a game that swings, the studio built several of those since; if you want one where the free spins arrive often enough to be worth choosing between, this is still the pick.

Try it next to Duck Hunters in the demo, and the contrast in pace is obvious, which is roughly what a five-year gap in a studio’s thinking looks like. A review of this one comes down to rhythm rather than reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

The 576-way setup and a symbol set weighted towards three-of-a-kind hits mean most spins land a win. They're small ones. Three card ranks pay 0.05x and three gold bars pay 0.25x, so frequency rather than size is what the main game offers.
Hunter Spins returns more, by a hundredth of a point in Deadwood's own rules, because a Hunter Wild is guaranteed on each of the eight spins. Gunslinger Spins gives you an uncapped sticky multiplier instead, which is the bigger swing and the lower average.
Badges land on reel 1 and reel 5. Two of them in standard play set off Shoot Out, which makes every low symbol on the three middle reels act as a Wild. Inside a Deadwood free-spin round, each badge adds one spin instead.
Two Sheriff Badges landing with three Scatters in the main game award 10 Shoot Out spins in whichever mode you choose. Two badges arriving together during an ordinary Deadwood free-spin round do the same job, locking the badges in place so the low symbols turn Wild every spin.
One Hunter Wild tops out at x4, since it gains 1 for each row it nudges through and it is four rows tall. Deadwood adds the multipliers of separate Wilds together, so a spin with three of them on reels 2, 3, and 4 can carry far more than x4.
The 2024 sequel tightens the board to 3-4-4-4-2 for 384 ways, runs at 96.09%, and takes the maximum win to 100,000x. It pays far less often in exchange, so the two are at opposite ends of the same western setting.