Dead Man's Broadside Slot Review

I've been spending some time with Backseat Gaming's new pirate-themed scatter-pays slot, and it's an interesting one. It shares its grid and max win with their earlier game, Hades Domain, but it takes a totally different approach to how it handles multipliers. Instead of just dropping them randomly, the whole game is built around creating overlapping multiplier zones on the board.

Triggering the bonus requires three, four, or five chests, which gets you 10, 20, or 30 free spins. If you prefer to skip the base game, you can buy the bonuses directly: Cannon Strike for 150x, Dead Man's Fury for 400x, or Final Broadside for a massive 1000x your bet. There's also the 310x Mystery Bonus, a draw that hands you one of the three, though I tend to avoid that since the game doesn't publish the exact odds of what you'll get. You can also play Bonus Boost at 2x a spin, which makes the bonus more likely, or Scatter Spins at a hefty 50x a spin, which guarantees at least two of the required chests on every spin.

The core mechanic really shines inside the free spins. Cannonballs drop onto the board, leaving behind multiplier zones that range from a 2x2 square to the entire grid. During the bonus, these lit zones are sticky for the whole round. The cool part is what happens when they overlap: if a new zone lands on top of an old one, the values add together. Any winning symbols that land inside these hot zones get their payouts multiplied accordingly.

To see what the game could really do, I bit the bullet and bought the 1000x bonus for 30 free spins. About three-quarters of my spins were completely dead. But when things line up, you see exactly why the bonus costs so much.

With nine spins left, I had a 3x3 zone sitting at 4x. A second 2x2 zone dropped inside it, bumping those overlapping tiles to 8x. The highlight of the round happened when a 2x2 block of wilds landed perfectly in that hot zone. In the bonus, these wild blocks connect with all paying symbols on the board at once. It linked up 11 pistols and 8 cutlasses in a single tumble, and those overlapping multipliers turned a standard 20x payout into a 560x win.

I love that the arithmetic is entirely visible: you can look at the board and know exactly which squares need to catch a win. Still, it's a highly volatile game; even with that massive hit, the round finished paying out about 700x my bet, meaning I still took a loss on the 1000x buy-in.

Dead Man's Broadside sits right next to Hades Domain in the studio's catalog. Both use a 6x5 tumbling board, feature a 96.01% RTP, and cap out at a 15,000x max win. But they play very differently. Hades drops multiplier orbs that add up at the end of a tumble but reset on the next spin, and its bonus relies on a collection ladder rather than sticky zones. It's also a bit friendlier on the wallet, with its priciest bonus buy at 500x.

It also feels distinct from the studio's other tumbling game, Zombie Dawgs (which multiplies its multipliers together rather than adding them), and Pragmatic Play's Sweet Loot, due in October, which restricts its multipliers to the top row.

Backseat Gaming has done something clever here by turning the grid itself into the main mechanic. However, it's worth noting that the top of the paytable is deliberately flat: for the premium symbols, getting 11 pays the exact same as getting 30. Because of this, a big cluster of symbols doesn't actually pay much on its own. The entire game hinges on your ability to get those multiplier zones to overlap, and praying a wild block lands exactly in the crosshairs. It's a highly transparent, satisfying mechanic.