Wheel of Pigs: every published figure, and who published it

The maths profile, figure by figure

There are five published quantities for this game and one published word. The return is a set of three certified builds. The volatility is a word, high, and every source that records it agrees. The stake band runs from 0.10 to 25 on our source. The direct cash prizes occupy one scale, 5× to 500×; the jackpot prizes occupy a different one, 15× to 5000×; and the overall listed maximum, 10,000×, is a third figure that belongs to neither of them.

That is the whole inventory. There is no published hit frequency, no published paytable in multiples, no figure for how often the wheel is reached, and no figure for how often a respin sequence runs past its first stage. Numbers for some of those circulate. None of them traces back to the supplier, and a number without a source is worse than a blank space, because it looks like an answer.

The pages here are organised around that inventory rather than around the game's features. Features are the subject of our other site about this slot; this one is the ledger.

Can the same slot carry a different return elsewhere?

For this title, yes, and not as an edge case — it is how the game is sold. The supplier's own details table does not give a percentage, it gives a field headed with variants and then lists 95, 93 and 91. A supplier writes a field that way when the game has been certified in more than one configuration and the decision about which one to run has been handed to the operator buying it.

Four points between the top build and the bottom one is not a rounding difference. It is the difference between a game sitting a little under the middle of the market and one sitting well below it, and over a long run it is the house edge doing its work roughly twice as fast. A page that printed the top figure alone would be describing a game you may well not be playing.

The practical consequence is short, and the whole of the return page is spent on it: the only source that is about your copy rather than about the title is the information panel inside the game you have opened. Everything else, this site included, is describing a product rather than a session.

Three value scales, kept as separate fields

The second thing that goes wrong with this game is addition. Three different multiples are published for it, and they describe three different things. Direct cash awards run 5× to 500× of the stake. Jackpot awards run 15× to 5000×. The overall listed maximum is 10,000×. Those are not the bottom, middle and top of one range, and the largest of them is not the sum of the other two.

Our source is explicit that the scales should not be merged, and that instruction is worth keeping because merging them is the natural mistake: three numbers, all multiples of the same stake, all printed near each other. Put them in one sentence as a range and you have invented a payout structure the game does not have.

So they stay in separate fields here, on every page that mentions them, and the coin values page walks through what each one is counted against.

Where each figure on this site came from

Four of the figures above come from the supplier's own page for this title: the three return builds, the volatility, the minimum stake and both prize bands. The maximum stake and the overall listed maximum come from our own earlier record of the same product, and the maximum is independently repeated by one of the two large listings that carry this game.

Those two listings are also where the disagreements live, and the disagreements are worth seeing rather than smoothing over. One gives the return as 95.00% and the stake ceiling as £5. The other gives the return as 95.3%, the stake ceiling as 40, and currently carries no maximum win at all. They agree with each other on the layout — five reels and three rows and 25 lines — and on high volatility, and on almost nothing else.

Read that pattern the right way round and it is not a mess, it is evidence. A title certified in several builds and sold to many operators will be sampled differently by whoever looks at it, and the sampling shows up as exactly this kind of spread. It is the clearest argument there is for publishing the supplier's set rather than anybody's single number, including our own.

Two studio names for one supplier, and a second title

You will meet this game under two studio names. Iron Dog Studio is the studio; it belongs to a network that also runs a second, older studio under its own name, and listings pick whichever of the two they file by. Nobody is wrong and there is nothing to resolve — the supplier's own page for this title carries the network's branding at the top and names Iron Dog Studio in the studio field further down. This site uses the studio name, which is also the name our outbound link reports.

There is a second, smaller naming wrinkle. One of the two large listings now files this record under a close variant of the title — same supplier, same release date, same symbols — so a reader following the game around will occasionally meet it under a name one word different from the one on the supplier's page. That is worth knowing and not worth worrying about; this site uses the name the supplier uses.