How to play
Star Voyage spins five reels in a three-row window, with rockets, astronauts, flying saucers and satellites as the picture symbols. Twenty paylines are fixed in place. Before a spin you pick the line bet (1, 2, 5, 10 or 20 credits) and the game charges twenty times that, so from 20 to 400 credits a spin. Your first session starts with 1,000 credits.
Tap Spin and the reels stop from left to right. A payline wins when it holds at least three matching symbols beginning on the first reel and running without a gap. Every winning line adds to the total; on any one line, only the highest possible reading is paid.
Two symbols work differently:
- The wild star takes the place of any symbol on a line, except the ringed planet.
- The ringed planet is the scatter. Three or more on screen, in any position, pay a multiple of your total bet and launch free spins.
During free spins the stake is fixed at the line bet that started them, the bet buttons are greyed out and the button reads Free spin. Planets that show up in the bonus add spins to the remaining count.
A slot built around the base game
Each reel here has 40 stops, and three of them are wild stars. Most of our five-reel machines carry two wilds on a 36-stop reel, so stars turn up noticeably more often. They fill gaps in lines all the time, which is what gives this machine its steady feel.
The pay table is set to match. Stars are generous as helpers but not as a jackpot: five of them pay 1,000 times the line bet, and three pay only 50. That leads to some lines that might surprise you. Picture star, star, star, Ace, Ace. As stars it’s three of a kind worth 50; as Aces it’s five in a row worth 75. The game pays the 75.
The bonus is the other half of the design. Planets are scarce (two per reel, showing in the window 15% of the time) and the free-spin packages are the shortest in our five-reel family: 8, 12 or 16 spins. The upshot is that close to four-fifths of what the machine pays back comes from ordinary paid spins rather than from bonus rounds.
Pay table
Paid per line, as multiples of the line bet:
| Symbol | 3 on a line | 4 on a line | 5 on a line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wild star | 50 | 175 | 1,000 |
| Rocket | 30 | 125 | 500 |
| Astronaut | 25 | 100 | 375 |
| Flying saucer | 19 | 75 | 250 |
| Satellite | 15 | 50 | 150 |
| A | 10 | 25 | 75 |
| K | 7 | 19 | 60 |
| Q | 6 | 15 | 50 |
| J | 5 | 12 | 35 |
| 10 | 4 | 10 | 30 |
Ringed planets, as multiples of the total bet: three pay 2 with 8 free spins, four pay 8 with 12, five pay 40 with 16. Open Pay table inside the game to see all of this in credits at your current line bet.
The odds
Reel positions are equally likely and each reel is independent of the others. Free spins are triggered about once every 38 spins. Calculating from the symbol counts on the strips gives a long-run return of exactly 95.59%, free spins included.
Five wild stars on a line come along, on average, once in about 21,000 spins. Five planets are rarer still, roughly once in 13,000 spins.
Strategy
The reels don’t respond to anything you do, and a long losing streak says nothing about the next spin. Over enough play the machine holds about 4.4% of every wager no matter which bet you pick.
So the useful decisions are about pacing:
- Compared with Lantern Dragon on the same reels, more of the return arrives in small line wins, so your balance tends to drift rather than lurch. Even so, a session of a few dozen spins can end well below where it started.
- Don’t count on the bonus to rescue a session. With short packages and a 1-in-38 trigger, free spins are a pleasant extra here, not the main event.
- Free spins replay at the stake that triggered them, so a bonus won at line bet 10 pays ten times what the same bonus pays at 1.
Lantern Dragon sits on exactly the same reels but loads its pay table onto five dragons for a much bigger, rarer top prize. For a bonus that comes around more often, Clover Hill is the one to try.
If you enjoy Star Voyage, try Sticky Respin Stars or Stud Hi-Lo next.
