In and Out NetEnt · heist slot
The cascade is the part of this game worth understanding first, because it changes what a round is. A win does not end a spin here. It clears itself off the screen, lets the gaps fill, and hands the new arrangement back to be judged again.
Everything else in the game is downstream of that: the marks it leaves, the space the bombs clear for it, the collection round it eventually opens.
Any paid win Starts a cascade no trigger symbol
One Stake per chain however many stages
Four steps Tier ladder
6x5 → 8x7 Grid during a chain
A spin lands. If enough matching symbols are on the screen, they pay. Then those symbols disappear, the positions they occupied are filled, and the whole screen is read again as though it had just landed. If the new arrangement pays, that pays too, and the same thing happens once more. The chain stops at the first screen that pays nothing.
That is the entire mechanic, and the reason to be precise about it is that it is very easy to describe in a way that misleads. A chain of four stages is not four spins. It is one spin, charged once, that happened to produce four payable arrangements in succession. The counter on the balance moves several times; the stake came out once.
The other half of the same correction is about expectation. A chain that is already three stages deep feels like something gathering momentum, and in a visual sense it is — the screen has been clearing and refilling, the marks are accumulating. But each refill is drawn independently. A long chain has no memory and no obligation to continue, and the fact that the round is taking longer does not mean it is heading anywhere in particular.
Every position begins a round with no tier at all. When a scattered win uses a position, that position becomes highlighted, and from then on each further win that includes it moves it one step up: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond. Diamond is the top of the ladder and nothing lifts a position past it.
What this produces, over a chain of several stages, is a record written on the board itself. The positions in the middle of the screen tend to climb fastest, because a scattered win is more likely to pass through them; the corners climb only when the pattern happens to reach them. By the end of a long chain the grid is not uniform any more, and the shape of it is a map of where the round has been.
That map is not decoration. It is the input to the collection round, where a position's tier decides what kind of value can land on it. A round that produced four cascades and lifted half the board to gold is worth something different, when the collection round opens, from a round that produced one cascade and marked three positions bronze.
Two things are happening at the same time during a chain, and they are easy to confuse. The cascade refills positions. The bomb adds positions. A bomb that lands against an edge pushes that edge outwards by a reel or a row before the refill happens, so the chain continues on a bigger board than it started on.
Each direction can be pushed only once in a round, which caps the shape at 8x7. The practical effect is that a chain which includes bombs tends to run longer than one that does not — more positions means more room for a payable arrangement to appear — and that a round can genuinely look different at its tenth second than it did at its first.
A larger board at the end of a chain is a description of what has happened, not a forecast of what is about to. The board resets to 6x5 on the next spin, and that spin knows nothing about this one.
There is a practical consequence that gets very little attention. A cascading round takes longer to resolve than a flat one — sometimes several times longer. That is pleasant to watch, and it is also the single biggest difference between this game and a plainer slot when it comes to how a session actually runs.
A slower round is not a cheaper round, but it does change the arithmetic of time. The same balance lasts more minutes here than it would on a game that settles instantly, which is worth knowing in both directions: it is more entertainment per stake, and it is also longer spent in front of the screen for the same money. Deciding beforehand how long a session is meant to last, rather than how many spins, fits this game better.
| What starts a cascade? |
Any paid win. There is no trigger symbol and no qualifying stake — a win resolves this way every time, on every spin. |
|---|---|
| Does a long chain cost more than a short one? |
No. However many stages a chain runs, it is one bet with several results. The stake is taken once, at the start. A chain that has already run four stages is also no more likely to run a fifth than it was to run a first. |
| What does a mark on a position do? |
It records that the position has paid. Each later win that uses the same position lifts it one step through Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond. |
| Do the marks survive the round? |
They last to the end of the round, including through free spins earned inside it, and they are what the collection round reads when it opens. The next spin starts clean. |