What is Nudge Wild?

A nudge wild is a wild symbol tall enough to cover a whole reel that does not always land squarely on one. When it stops half on and half off the visible area, the game slides it up or down until the reel is fully covered, and the win is then evaluated with the complete wild in place. The distinction from an expanding wild is worth holding. An expanding wild is normally a single-square symbol that grows to fill its reel after landing. A nudge wild is already the full height and is simply repositioned, which means it can only be nudged if it landed partly in view to begin with — a wild that stopped entirely above or below the window is not pulled back into play. What this changes in practice is the count of near misses. On a game with tall stacked wilds and no nudge, a wild that lands one row short pays nothing extra. With a nudge, that same drop becomes a full wild reel. The mechanic therefore raises the effective frequency of wild reels without changing how often the symbol itself appears, and studios that publish a hit frequency have already accounted for it in the figure. Some games apply the nudge only in a specific mode, such as during a respin or when reels have merged into a single wide one, rather than on every spin. The paytable is where that restriction is stated, and it is the part most worth reading, because a nudge that works only in a bonus round is a very different feature from one that works throughout.