Power, Extra Power, Super Power, Ultimate Power: the Age of the Gods jackpot game

Playtech's Age of the Gods series is best known for its four linked progressive prizes, and the names can confuse a first-time player: Power, Extra Power, Super Power and Ultimate Power sound like bet levels, not prizes. They are four separate pots that sit above the reels of every game in the family, and they are won through a single mini-game that has nothing to do with the paylines. This guide explains the tiers, the start of the jackpot game, the coin board, the open question of stake size and how one pool can be shared by many titles.

Where the series came from

Playtech announced Age of the Gods in April 2016 as a suite of seven progressive jackpot network slots. The trade title iGaming Business reported that the first release was Age of the Gods: King of Olympus, a five-reel, 25-line game, with Hercules, Furious Four, Athena, Age of the Gods and Fate Sisters to follow during 2016. At launch, Playtech said each game linked to its progressive jackpot network, which already covered more than 70 games. The series has grown well past the original seven since then: one jackpot tracker lists 21 titles today, including God of Storms, Medusa & Monsters, Prince of Olympus and several Norse-themed games. On this site you can compare King of Olympus with the later God of Storms; the reels and features differ, but the jackpot layer on top works the same way.

The four tiers and their starting values

Each pot starts from a fixed seed and grows as a share of every qualifying bet is added. Published seed values are quoted in the currency of the site that reports them, so treat the amounts below as pounds or euros, not rand.

Each step is ten times the one below it until the top, where Ultimate Power jumps twenty times over Super Power (£100,000 / £5,000 = 20). Jackpot Slots Online states that 0.99% of each bet goes into the jackpot pool. That figure comes from a tracker, not from a Playtech document, and the split between the four tiers is not published at all, so you cannot work out how fast each pot grows. What you can see is the live value displayed in the game, which is the only number that counts at the moment you play.

How the jackpot game starts

There is no jackpot symbol to line up. The bonus is triggered at random at the end of a paid spin, independent of what the reels show. PlayOJO's game page puts it simply: any base-game spin has a chance to start the jackpot round. A losing spin can trigger it as easily as a winning one, and nothing on screen tells you that the game is “due”. Two points follow from that:

• Demo or free-play modes do not carry live progressive jackpots, so the round you see in a demo is not the real one.
• The trigger chance is not published as a number. Reviews and trackers describe it as random; none prints an actual probability.

The coin board, step by step

Once triggered, the reels make way for a separate screen. The sequence below is the one described consistently by OLBG, PlayOJO and Jackpot Slots Online:

1. A board of 20 face-down gold coins appears. Each coin hides one of the four jackpot symbols.
2. You click a coin and it flips to show its symbol. Picks are cumulative: every revealed coin stays face up.
3. The first symbol to appear three times wins its tier. Three Power symbols pay the Power pot, three Ultimate Power symbols pay the top pot, and so on.
4. If you do nothing, a timer runs out (Jackpot Slots Online gives 30 seconds) and the game reveals the outcome for you.
5. The prize is added to your balance and you return to the reels.

Because a tier is won as soon as any symbol reaches three, the round always ends with a payout. OLBG states it directly: you are guaranteed to win a progressive jackpot when you enter the feature. Most of those wins are the small Power and Extra Power pots; the rules do not publish how often each symbol is hidden under the coins, so the odds of each tier are unknown to the player. It also means picking “clever” coins makes no difference: the outcome is set by the game, and the flips only reveal it.

Does a bigger stake improve the chance?

This is the question players ask most, and the published sources do not agree. OLBG's guide to the series says the jackpot can trigger on any spin with any bet size, and that the higher your bet, the higher your chances of triggering it. Jackpot Slots Online takes the opposite care: it notes that the game's rules do not state that larger stakes raise the chance, while calling it likely. For two Norse titles in the family, Norse King of Asgard and Ways of Thunder, the same tracker quotes rules that do tie the chance to the stake.

The honest reading is this: a minimum bet can win the Ultimate Power pot, and on many versions a bigger stake probably buys a proportionally bigger chance, because the stake also feeds the pool proportionally. But it is a game-by-game rule, and the only binding wording is the help screen of the version loaded at your casino. If the rules say the probability is proportional to the bet, doubling the stake doubles both the cost and the chance, so the return per rand wagered does not improve. Nothing in any source suggests that raising the stake turns the game into a better bet; it only changes how fast you spend.

One pool, many titles

All Age of the Gods games that carry the four-tier jackpot feed the same four pots across every casino running Playtech's network version. A spin on Furious Four and a spin on God of Storms in another country add to the same Ultimate Power figure, which is why it can climb to six figures between wins. There are exceptions to check: OLBG notes that the Norse games use a different set of three jackpots (Ultimate, Daily and Instant), and Jackpot Slots Online lists Lord of Lightning as having only one progressive.

The pool is also older than the series. Jackpot Slots Online reports an Ultimate Power win of $771,603 in January 2018 and describes it as the 56th win for that jackpot since 2010, and it says the largest recorded Ultimate Power win, $1,365,801 at Titan Casino, came while the pot was still linked to Playtech's Marvel series. In other words, Playtech moved an existing network of four pots onto the new mythology theme rather than starting from zero. For a wider view of linked and single-game pots, see our sibling article on progressive and fixed jackpot slots and the jackpot slots section.

What to check before you play

RTP, bet range and even the jackpot rules can differ between casinos and markets, because Playtech supplies several configurations. Before staking real money, open the help or paytable screen and look for three things: the RTP printed for that version, whether the jackpot is shown as active (a live, moving figure rather than a static one), and the sentence that describes how the jackpot game is triggered. If a casino's version says the jackpot is not available in your region, the coin game will not appear at all. South African law does not license online casino games under the National Gambling Act 7 of 2004, so these games are offered only from sites licensed elsewhere; gambling is for adults 18 and over. If the chase for the next pot stops being entertainment, the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation runs a free counselling line on 0800 006 008, and you can SMS “HELP” to 076 675 0710. For the base game itself, start with our Age of the Gods review.