Cubes Slot by Hacksaw Gaming

A 5x5 Grid That Grows With Every Win

Cubes starts simple: 25 positions, six colored cubes, no wilds, no scatters, no traditional paylines. Match five or more adjacent cubes of the same color to score a cluster win. That's it. The catch is what happens after - every win expands the grid by two rows and two columns. 5x5 becomes 7x7, then 9x9, then 11x11, pushing the playing field from 25 positions to 121.

All six cube colors pay the same. A 5-cube cluster returns 0.1x your bet, while 25+ cubes pays 40x. The flat paytable strips away the symbol hierarchy most slots rely on, keeping the math focused entirely on cluster size and whether you hit the center multiplier.

The Center Cube Multiplier

Every spin places a multiplier marker on the center position of the grid. If that center cube forms part of a winning cluster, the entire win gets multiplied - and the multiplier value scales with cluster size, topping out at 22x. On the base 5x5 grid, hitting the center is common since it sits surrounded by 8 neighbors. Once the grid expands to 11x11, the center becomes a smaller target in a much bigger field, but the clusters needed to reach it are also bigger.

This creates an interesting tension. Small grids give you better odds of hitting the multiplier. Large grids give you bigger clusters. You want both, and the game rarely delivers both at once.

Color Collection Free Spins

Forget scatters. Cubes triggers its bonus round by requiring winning clusters in five different colors during a single base game sequence. Each unique color win lights up one letter in C-U-B-E-S across the top of the screen. Light all five and you get 10 free spins.

In practice, this trigger is brutal. You need five separate color wins to connect in sequence, and the expanding grid resets between rounds. Most sessions end without seeing free spins at all, and there's no buy bonus to skip the grind. Hacksaw didn't add that option until later POCKETZ titles.

When free spins do hit, a random color is selected as the sticky color. Wins with that color stay locked on the grid for all 10 spins, building toward larger and larger clusters. Reach a 70-cube cluster of the sticky color and the Colour Blast fires - an instant 2,500x payout that represents most of the game's 3,167x cap.

POCKETZ Origins and the Cubes 2 Comparison

Cubes is the fourth game in Hacksaw's POCKETZ line, a mobile-first format launched in late 2019 with OmNom and Miami Multiplier. The series now spans 11 titles including Frutz, King Carrot, and Fear the Dark. Early entries shared medium volatility and modest ceilings under 8,000x. Post-2021 POCKETZ games pushed into high volatility with 10,000x+ potential and bonus buys.

Hacksaw released Cubes 2 in February 2021 - their first sequel - and it addressed the original's main weaknesses head-on. Max win jumped to 11,000x. Volatility went from 3/5 to 5/5 lightning bolts. The single center multiplier became four corner multipliers. Two buy bonus options at 109x and 129x eliminated the frustration of never reaching free spins organically.

The original still plays differently, though. At medium volatility with 31.94% hit frequency, it bleeds less during dry stretches. For casual mobile sessions - exactly what POCKETZ was designed for - the gentler variance is a legitimate upside. And the single-RTP configuration of 96.35% (Cubes predates Hacksaw's multi-tier RTP system introduced from 2021 onward) means you don't need to worry about operators running a reduced 88% version.

Where Cubes falls short is obvious: 3,167x is low by Hacksaw standards, and the free spin trigger borders on theoretical for many players. It's an early-career game from a studio that has since produced Wanted Dead or a Wild and Chaos Crew, and the gap in production value shows. But the expanding grid mechanic, identical-payout symbols, and position-dependent multiplier were genuinely new ideas when this launched in March 2020. Hacksaw was still figuring out what kind of studio they wanted to be, and Cubes was one of the answers.