Tombstone RIP

What these figures mean for Tombstone RIP

Tombstone R.I.P. advertises a top prize of 300,000 times your stake, and Nolimit City publishes the one number that explains what that means: the maximum lands once in 130,000,000 spins. Those two figures belong together, and almost nowhere outside the studio's own specification will you see the second one printed next to the first. At one spin every six seconds — six hundred an hour, which is faster than most people actually play — 130 million spins is a little under 25 years of continuous play. The ceiling is real in the sense that the maths permits it. It is not a reasonable thing to play for.

What you are actually buying is dispersion. The studio's volatility index for this game is 66.85, the highest figure in this catalogue by a wide margin and more than twenty times the 3.1 that NetEnt publishes for Starburst. The index is not a marketing label like "high volatility" — it is a number the studio calculates and states, which is why it can be compared across games at all. Its practical meaning is on this page as well: the hit frequency is 9.08%, so something comes back on roughly one spin in eleven. Ten spins in eleven return nothing.

The return itself is 96.08%, and it is split in a way that matters more than the headline. Nolimit City publishes 55.99% as the base-game return and 40.08% as the bonus return. So about four tenths of everything this game gives back is locked behind the free-spins round, and that round arrives once in 194 spins on the studio's own figure. Stake £1 a spin and you are, on average, £194 into the game before the part that carries 40 points of the return turns up. That arithmetic is ours, not theirs: we are dividing their published odds by nothing more complicated than one, but the conclusion — that most of a session is spent in a base game designed to return barely more than half your money — is a direct consequence of two numbers they print and most sites ignore.

The middle of the distribution is thin too. A win of 100x your stake or better comes once in 1,014 spins. That is the number to hold onto, because 100x is roughly the smallest outcome that changes a session: it turns £1 into £100. Once in a thousand spins is the honest frequency for that, and it sits a long way from both the 9% hit rate and the 130-million-spin ceiling. Between "something small came back" and "the maximum" there is a very wide, very empty space, and that space is what an index of 66.85 describes.

Tombstone R.I.P. also sells a feature buy, and the buy is where the volatility becomes a decision rather than a condition. Buying the bonus skips the 194-spin wait, which means skipping the base game that returns 55.99% — the cheaper part of the machine. We have not tested what the buy costs in this game at any operator, and the price is set in the game client rather than published in the specification, so we are not going to quote one. What can be said from the published figures alone: the bonus carries 40.08 points of return, the base game carries 55.99, and a buy replaces a long stretch of the second with an immediate instance of the first. Whether the price makes that a good trade is exactly the thing we cannot check from here.

Two games in this catalogue make a useful comparison, both from the same studio. Karen Maneater returns 96% — eight hundredths of a point below this one — and splits it almost identically, 55.59% base and 40.41% bonus. Its bonus arrives at a near-identical rate, once in 204 spins. By every number that describes the shape of the return, the two games are siblings. Then look at the ends: Karen Maneater's volatility index is 36.42 against 66.85 here, its ceiling is 11,757x against 300,000x, and its maximum lands once in 330,000 spins rather than once in 130 million — 394 times more often. Same studio, same return, same split, and a top prize that is within reach of a long-term player in one case and not in the other. If you ever needed proof that RTP is the wrong number to choose a game by, it is those two specifications side by side.

One point in this game's favour, and it is not a small one: Nolimit City publishes a single certified return rather than a set of builds, so there is no question of one casino running a 96% version and another an 88% one. Every Hacksaw title in this catalogue carries four builds with about eight points between best and worst, and the player is rarely told which is live. Here the figure is the figure. A studio that publishes its maximum-win odds and declines to sell cheaper versions of the same game is being straight with you in two ways at once, and neither of them makes the game kind.

So the useful way to read this page is to ignore the 300,000x entirely and ask whether a game that pays on one spin in eleven, hides four tenths of its return behind a round you reach every two hundred, and needs a thousand spins for an outcome worth noticing is a game you want to sit at. That question has a reasonable answer either way. The 300,000x is not part of it: by the studio's own arithmetic it happens once in 25 years of continuous spinning, and printing it on the paytable next to an odds figure of one in 130 million is the most honest advertising in gambling.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures Nolimit City states for Tombstone RIP itself — not our estimates.

How Tombstone RIP compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures. Nolimit City lists this title as certified for UKGC.