This can be really useful and get you some tasty winning combinations and take away the disappointment felt when you find yourself one symbol short of a winning combination. Wilds come in many forms now in the ever-changing world of slot games. There are sticky wilds and shifting wilds and then there are the expanding wilds.
As the graphics in slot games continual to develop, the expanding wild can be a spectacular sight. It’s great to see the wild symbol suddenly expand to cover the whole reel.

‘Fruit Zen’ Expanding Wilds
For example in the ‘Fruit Zen’ game from BetSoft which is a popular 3D slot game, the Fruit Zen symbol is the wild in the game. When you enter the bonus game it becomes an expanding wild and the entire reel that it lands on becomes wild. Then it’s just a case of counting your impressive winnings.
With such a useful feature such as this, the game designers aren’t going to always make it too easy for them to be triggered. That’s why they sometimes only occur on a certain number of the reels. Remember most times they occur only in the bonus game so that has to be triggered in the first place. That can mean having to get a certain number of scatter, bonus or free spins symbols on the reels.
In ‘Hitman’ from Microgaming, the expanding wild only appears on the second, third and fourth reels during the bonus game. Again this is the icing on the cake as more and more wins can be obtained when this happens.

‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Expanding Wild bat symbol in action
As you can see therefore, playing a game with an expanding wild really does add excitement to the game, especially when randomly triggered.