Wheel of Pigs wheel feature: three destinations, one pointer

How a money wheel works when it sits above the reels

A wheel in a slot does one job: it converts a trigger into a selection. On its own it has no values to pay and no round to run; it divides what might happen next into labelled segments and then picks one of them. Everything that follows belongs to whichever segment was picked, not to the wheel.

Putting it physically above the reels is a presentation decision with a consequence for reading the game. The trigger is visible in the lower half and the outcome is visible in the upper half, so cause and effect occupy different parts of the screen and are easy to tell apart. Our product page for this title describes the same arrangement as two linked stages: the wheel on top, the reels and the coins as the active field below.

The basics: three segments' worth of outcome

The wheel has three defined outcomes. The first is Hold and Win, which opens the persistent-coin respin sequence and is therefore not a value at all but a round. The second is Cash Prize, which resolves within a band from 5× to 500×. The third is Jackpot Prize, which uses a separate band from 15× to 5000×.

Two of the three end the feature almost immediately; one of them is where the feature actually begins. That asymmetry is the single most useful thing to know about the wheel, because it means the pointer is not selecting between three sizes of the same thing. It is selecting between a round and two amounts.

• Hold and Win — a round, not a value: coins lock and a counter starts
• Cash Prize — one value from the lower band
• Jackpot Prize — one value from the upper band, which is a separate scale

What triggers the spin

Coins. One or more Piggy Coins on the reels create a chance to activate the feature, and the coin is the only thing on these pages described as a trigger. A coin is doubly relevant while it is on screen: it carries a visible value and it is also the route toward the wheel, which is why the game gives coins their own distinct feedback rather than letting them read as ordinary symbols.

Nothing about the stake, the hour or the preceding spins is a trigger. If the stake changes what a given value is worth in money, that is arithmetic and belongs on the numbers page; it does not change what opens the wheel.

Reading the pointer before the value lands

The destinations are distinguished before anything is applied — by label, by colour block and by the final resting position of the pointer. In a game-show presentation that ordering is deliberate: the current state is communicated before the next action, so a player is never watching an amount appear without knowing which kind of amount it is.

It also prevents a specific misreading. A jackpot prize and a cash prize come from different bands, and seeing a value without seeing which band it came from makes the two bands look like one wide scale. They are not one scale, and the game marks the difference at the moment the pointer stops rather than afterwards.

Variations other wheel games use, and what this one does without

Wheel features across the genre collect a familiar set of extras: tiered jackpots with four names, grids that grow during the round, multiplier ladders that climb while a feature runs, and buy-ins that place a player straight into the feature for a fixed price. Any of these can be bolted onto the structure described above without changing it.

For Wheel of Pigs we publish none of them, because our source does not. What it does publish is the three destinations, one jackpot band rather than a tiered ladder, and the respin round with its counter. An absence here means the fact is not established, not that the game has been checked and found to lack the feature — and the game's own rules are the place where that is settled.