What is Wild Reel?

A wild reel is an entire reel turned wild, so every position on it substitutes for the paying symbols. The reel behaves as though each of its cells held a wild symbol, which means any winning combination that needs a symbol on that reel is given one. It arrives by one of three routes. It can be a stacked wild tall enough to fill the reel it lands on. It can be a designed transformation, where a symbol or a feature converts a named reel after the spin lands. Or it can be a random feature that adds one or more wild reels to a spin that had none, usually announced with an animation before the win is evaluated. How much a wild reel is worth depends entirely on the maths around it. On a five-reel, left-to-right game a wild first reel does very little on its own, because the remaining reels still have to produce the rest of the combination; on the last reel it completes lines that were already most of the way there. On a ways-to-win or grid game, where every symbol on a reel multiplies the live combinations, a wild reel can be the largest single event the game has. Judge it by the game, not the name.