When you are trying to win money on a slot machine, you need all the help you can get. Well, a wild symbol certainly helps you on the way to getting plenty of winning combinations and seeing your account balance grow.

Wild symbols have been part of the slot world for a long time going back to those fruit machines you used to play in cafes or amusement arcades. So what exactly is a wild symbol and how will it help you win cash?

A wild symbol is a designated symbol in the game just like a scatter symbol or a free spins symbol. The design of the wild symbol can take several forms. In some games not a great deal of thought goes into its symbol and you simply get a symbol saying ‘Wild’ like in Fremantle Media’s ‘Family Fortunes‘ or just a plain old ‘W’. Often though, it follows the main theme of the game so in BetSoft’s ‘Mad Scientist‘ slot game, the wild symbol is the chalkboard on which the scientist writes his latest formulae.

You don’t have to pay any extra charge for the game in order for the wild to come into play. Here’s what happens, you simply decide your stake and the number of paylines you wish to play and press spin. If a wild ends up on an active payline then it’s important to look at its neighbouring symbols. Why? Well the function of a wild symbol is to substitute for other symbols in the game. Not all of them though, usually it is unable to substitute for the scatter or bonus symbols as this would make triggering a bonus round a whole lot easier.

If for example, the wild symbol ends up next to two of the Ace symbols, it substitutes for the Ace and that means you get three Ace symbols in a row and that’s a winning combination. This helps you get more winning combinations.

That’s not all though because it’s common for the win you receive to have a multiplier attached to it when it’s a wild that forms a winning combination. It’s often just a case of your win being doubled but it all helps doesn’t it?

The wild symbols don’t always appear on every one of the reels that the slot game has. It’s important that you have a good look through the paytable and find out the full details about how the wild functions in the game and on which reels it can be found.

If you’re really lucky the game will have more than one wild symbol. That’s the case in the BetSoft game ‘Good Girl Bad Girl‘. Here you have two wild symbols and they both have a multiplier attached to them too.

As well as playing a vital role in getting you wins, it also often has its own important value in the game. Getting five wilds in a row on an active payline can be the highest winning combination in some games so it really does pay to keep an eye out for those wild symbols.

The wild symbol can also be involved in the bonus game. For example in ‘Mad Scientist‘ there’s a ‘Wild o’ Cution’ bonus game where an electric shock cause several symbols to turn wild. That really increases your chance of winning big prizes.

The wild symbol has certainly undergone several changes in recent years as games continue to develop. They now come in a variety of forms with everything from sticky wilds to shifting wilds, stacked wilds and even expanding wilds, all increasing your chances of getting winning combinations.