Rich Wilde and the Tome of Madness

Rich Wilde and the Tome of Madness is a Play’n GO slot released on June 27, 2019, taking the explorer from Egyptian tombs into Lovecraftian horror. It replaces the earlier games’ fixed paylines with a 5×5 Cluster Pays grid, where 4 or more matching symbols connected horizontally or vertically pay and cascade away. The stated theoretical RTP is 96.59%, volatility is high, and the win cap sits at 2,000x the bet.

Two wild symbols drive the base game. The Necronomicon-styled Special Wild substitutes broadly and is seeded onto the grid as the Portal Meter charges; a separate Rich Wilde character wild also substitutes and doubles the win of any cluster it joins. Neither triggers on its own, so their value depends entirely on landing inside an active cluster.

The Portal Meter

A meter in the top-left corner fills with every winning symbol cleared from the grid, and resets to zero on any spin with no win at all. At 7 charged symbols, 2 Special Wilds are added to the grid; at 14, another 2 arrive and can trigger the Abyss effect, clearing every symbol in a Special Wild’s row or column; at 27, 2 more Special Wilds can trigger the Void effect, wiping every copy of a random low- or high-value symbol; and at 42, the meter is full.

The Other World Free Round

Reaching 42 charged symbols opens the Other World Free Round, a single extended round rather than a batch of conventional free spins. It starts with a minimum of 3 Portal Effects, rising to a maximum of 7 with overcharge, and the grid displays 11 or 12 Eye Marks. Landing a winning cluster over an Eye opens it, and opening every Eye releases the Cthulhu Mega Wild, a 2×2 wild that moves down the grid with each cascade, substituting broadly along the way.

Tome of Madness Review

Tome of Madness is the pivot point where the Rich Wilde series stopped being payline slots with a strong bonus and became a laboratory for meter-driven cluster design. Everything that followed under the Tome name, Tome of Insanity, Tome of Dead, even the bingo spin-off, inherits this game’s charge-and-release structure rather than the earlier titles’ scatter triggers. The Portal Meter rewards sustained winning streaks and punishes cold ones by resetting on any dry spin, which makes the game feel streaky in a way the fixed-line entries never did.

For players who want to watch a single mechanic escalate methodically toward a release, rather than chase a random scatter hit, this remains the series’ cleanest execution of the idea. The theme shift matters too: swapping tombs and pharaohs for a candlelit gothic library and a Necronomicon-styled tome gave Play’n GO’s art team room to build a genuinely different mood from the rest of the franchise, and later Lovecraft-themed entries have leaned on that same visual language rather than starting over. Six years after release, the high volatility rating still means patience is required between meaningful Portal charges, but the payoff structure has aged well precisely because nothing about it depends on being new.