Ronin Stackways

Ronin Stackways Review

Ronin Stackways is the middle child of the Stackways family, and the one most people skip over. It arrived in August 2023, three months after Mayan Stackways introduced the mechanic and two months before Benny the Beer took it to a beer garden. Sitting between two louder games, it tends to get described as the one with the nice artwork. That undersells it, because two things about the Stackways mechanic that people credit to Benny were actually worked out here.

The first is the split symbol. Mayan ran one Stackways symbol carrying every depth from 2 to 10. Ronin divides the job in two: a Normal Stackways showing 2, 3 or 4, and a Revealing Stackways that hides a number from 5 to 10 until it lands. Benny inherited that arrangement wholesale. The second is Super Stack Spins, a bonus round in which only the Revealing type is allowed to appear, so every stack that lands is at least five symbols deep. Nothing else in the family does that.

What Ronin gives up in exchange is ceiling and edge. The max win is 5,000x your bet, half what Mayan and Benny offer, and Hacksaw Gaming have tuned it as the calmest of the three by some distance. Reviewers put the volatility at two out of five, the hit frequency is 33%, and there is no hold and collect round, no Reel Activator, and no hidden five-scatter bonus. It is Stackways with everything stripped away except Stackways.

Whether that is a loss depends on what you wanted. If Mayan Gold was the reason you played Mayan, there is nothing here for you. If the stacking itself was the appeal, this is the purest version of it Hacksaw has made.

Five reels and four rows with ways wins, so matching symbols pay on adjacent reels from left to right, and every combination of positions counts as its own way. Stakes range from $0.10 to $200, and the published return is 96.35%, based on 10 billion simulated rounds.

The paytable is flat by design. The card royals pay 0.7x your bet for five of a kind; the panda, bear, and fox each pay 2x, the tiger 3x, and the green monkey 4x at the top. That is thin because the game does not pay you for symbol value, it pays you for the number of ways, and the two Stackways symbols exist to manufacture ways in bulk.

A Normal Stackways fills its reel with 2, 3, or 4 copies of one paying symbol; a Revealing Stackways fills it with 5 to 10. Three scatters open Stack Spins, four open Super Stack Spins, and the 5,000x max win is reachable in the base game as well as in either round.

How To Play

• Set your stake between $0.10 and $200. Wins run from the leftmost reel rightward on adjacent reels, and every way pays separately.
• Land a Stackways symbol to fill its reel with a stack of one paying symbol. Normal Stackways show their depth openly, 2, 3 or 4. Revealing Stackways show a question mark and open to a number from 5 to 10.
• You do not choose the symbol. The game picks whichever creates the longest winning way, and stacks nothing at all if no win would result.
• Three scatters award Stack Spins, ten free spins with a raised chance of both Stackways types landing.
• Four scatters award Super Stack Spins, ten free spins in which only Revealing Stackways can appear.
• In either round, two scatters add two spins and three add four.
• Check the RTP in the game info before you start. This ships at 96.35%, 94.33%, 92.24% or 88.23%.

Bonus Features

How the stack is chosen

This rule is shared across the family and it is the one that matters. When a Stackways symbol lands, the game looks at every paying symbol on the board and asks which one, stacked on this reel, would create the longest winning way. That symbol fills the stack. If no symbol would produce a win, the reel does not stack at all and the Stackways symbol is dead weight. Two consequences follow. You cannot misplay it, because there is no input. And a Stackways symbol landing in poor company does nothing whatsoever, so the dry stretches are dry in the way a ways game is dry, with a stacking symbol sitting on the reels doing nothing.

Stack Spins

Three scatters award ten free spins with a higher chance of both Stackways types appearing. That is the entire description on the info screen, and it is accurate. There is no additional symbol, no reel that locks and no progression. The round is simply the base game with the Stackways rate turned up, and the interest comes from Revealing symbols arriving more often than they do outside it. Two scatters during the round add two spins, three add four.

Super Stack Spins, and why it is the reason to play

Four scatters award ten free spins in which only Revealing Stackways can appear. Read that carefully, because it changes the math of the round completely. Every Stackways symbol that lands is now at least five deep, and up to ten. There is no such thing as a small stack.

The ways count in a ways game is the product of the number of matching symbols on each reel. Five reels stacked five deep is 3,125 ways. Five reels stacked ten deep is the 100,000 on the box. In the base game, reaching the second of those needs five Revealing symbols to land together and all of them to open at 10, which is why nobody ever sees it. In Super Stack Spins the floor moves. A full board of stacks at the minimum depth is already 3,125 ways, and at 4x for the monkey that is 12,500x before the 5,000x cap is applied. Even the fox at 2x clears the cap from a minimum depth full board. Only the royals at 0.7x fall short, at roughly 2,190x.

So in this one round, the 100,000 ways figure stops being a boast and becomes irrelevant in the opposite direction: you do not need anything close to it. You need five reels to stack in the same spin with a symbol that pays more than the royals, and the game will hand you the max win with room to spare. That is still a hard ask, because the selection rule only stacks a reel when doing so creates a win, so the five stacks have to build a single chain from the left. But it is a specific, visible thing to chase, and the round is designed so that when stacks do arrive, they arrive big.

The buy menu

• BonusHunt FeatureSpins, 3x. Each spin is more likely to trigger a bonus. Returns 96.29%. Rated high volatility.
• Stackways FeatureSpins, 40x. Spins with guaranteed Stackways symbols. Returns 96.25%. Rated very high, the only product here that is.
• Stack Spins, 100x. The three scatter round outright. Returns 96.27%. Rated medium.
• Super Stack Spins, 200x. The Revealing only round outright. Returns 96.34%. Rated medium.

Two things about this menu are unusual for a Stackways game. The first is that every product returns less than the 96.35% base game. In Mayan and Benny all four buys beat the base return; here all four fall below it, though the largest gap is a tenth of a percentage point and the smallest is a hundredth, so nobody will feel any of it across a session. It does mean there is no on paper case for buying. The reasons to buy are access and variance, not return.

The second is the inversion the family always seems to carry. The 200x product is rated medium and the 40x product is rated very high, so the price ladder and the volatility ladder run in opposite directions again. Super Stack Spins is a structured round: ten spins, only deep stacks, a defined ceiling that a full board hits easily, so outcomes cluster around the middle. Stackways FeatureSpins forces stacks of either type onto the reels every spin and lets the ways arithmetic do whatever it does, which swings hard. If you want to see Super Stack Spins, buy it. If you want variance, it is the 40x product, not the 200x one.

Why 5,000x changes the arithmetic

Ronin shares its 4x top symbol and its 0.7x royals with the rest of the family, but it carries half their cap. In Mayan and Benny the 10,000x ceiling arrives at 2,500 ways, two and a half percent of the advertised 100,000. Here it arrives at 1,250 ways, or 1.25%. A board of five reels stacked four deep with the monkey is 1,024 ways and 4,096x, most of the way there without a single Revealing symbol involved. One Revealing stack of 5 in place of a 4 takes the same board to 1,280 ways and over the cap. In the base game and Stack Spins that board is rare. In Super Stack Spins, where the shallowest possible stack is 5, it is the floor.