- Provider
- Play'n GO
- Released
- 2016
- Board
- Five reels, three positions deep
- Feature
- One expanding symbol per sequence
Release status and the shape of the board
Play'n GO lists this as a 2016 release, and it is still near the front of offshore lobbies a decade later, not retired, not renumbered, not replaced by a sequel. That longevity is why this page spends a whole section on return figures instead of quoting one: every operator integration is a separate decision about which certified build gets loaded, and a title integrated more or less continuously since 2016 has had far more of those decisions made about it than anything released last quarter.
The structure is plain by modern standards. Five reels, and the provider's description of the feature has the chosen symbol expanding to cover all three positions on its reel, which fixes the row count at three. Lines are fixed rather than selectable, so the stake control changes the amount per spin and nothing about the shape of the board. Confirm the exact line count and the left-to-right direction in the loaded paytable rather than from a lobby tile, because tiles are written by operators and paytables are written by the studio.
One symbol does two jobs. The Book is the wild, substituting in ordinary combinations, and it is also the scatter that pays and triggers the feature by count rather than position. That dual role is why a Book landing can complete a line win and advance the trigger count at once, and it is the commonest source of confusion when a player tries to reconcile a payout with the board.
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The symbol draw: one decision made before your first spin
The free-spin sequence is a lottery inside a lottery, and the first draw happens before the first spin. Play'n GO states that before the sequence begins, an ordinary symbol is randomly chosen to act as the Special Expanding Symbol for the whole sequence. Not per spin. Once. The spins then run with that one symbol privileged above the rest.
The chosen symbol behaves in two ways at once. It still pays as a normal symbol in ordinary combinations, and when enough of it lands it expands to fill the positions on its reel, with the provider describing further prizes awarded on that expansion. That expansion produces the screen-wide results the game is known for, because an expanded reel is a reel of guaranteed matches for every line passing through it.
Here is the part worth internalising, and it is specific to this engine rather than to pokies in general. The symbol set contains low-paying card-style symbols and high-paying character symbols. The draw does not weight toward the ones you want. A sequence in which a low-value symbol is chosen can run its full length, expand repeatedly, look busy, and return very little, because what is being multiplied across the board is a small paytable entry. A sequence in which a top symbol is chosen can resolve on a single spin. Same number of spins, same mechanic, same stake, radically different distribution — and the determining event happened before you pressed anything.
That is also why feature footage of this game is close to worthless as a guide. A clip shows one draw and one sequence; it cannot tell you how the draw is weighted, and the provider's public description does not publish that weighting. What the feature is worth in your build reaches you only through the loaded return figure, never through a video.
Entry, the additive retrigger, and what a retrigger does not do
Entry is by count. Play'n GO states that three Scatter Symbols trigger the free spins, and that landing three or more again during the sequence awards a further allocation of the same size. The retrigger is additive and uses the same condition as the original entry, which is unusually clean — several of the studio's later titles changed the retrigger requirement, so do not carry an assumption from one of those back to this one. The spin count itself is on the loaded rule screen beside the scatter entry.
The retrigger inherits the chosen symbol. A retrigger does not re-draw. You keep the symbol you were given, for better or worse, across the extended sequence. On a favourable draw that compounds usefully. On an unfavourable one it extends a sequence that was never going to pay much, which is the mechanical explanation for the frustrating experience of a long, loud, cheap bonus round.
Scatter payments and feature entry are separate events that happen to share a trigger. Read in the paytable whether your build pays the scatter count as a prize in addition to opening the sequence, because the ordinary-win animation and the feature-entry animation tend to run together and the total on screen does not label which part came from where.
On a feature purchase: this title predates the bonus-buy convention, and whether a buy control appears at all depends on the build and the jurisdiction rather than on the game's original design. If you see one, treat it as a separate product with its own stated return and its own price in your account currency. Read the confirmation amount rather than the multiplier on the button, and check whether a promotion excludes purchases before using one with bonus funds.
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Return figures: what the certified number can and cannot tell you here
There is no single return figure for Book of Dead, and a page that prints one as a fact about the title is describing one build in one lobby. Play'n GO certifies releases at more than one configuration and the operator picks one when it integrates the game. Because this title has been in continuous distribution since release, the spread of builds live somewhere at any given moment is wider than it would be for a recent launch, and the published record has had a decade to drift away from the installed reality.
The second thing to say about the figure is particular to this engine, and it is why the number matters less here than readers expect. Whatever figure your build states is a long-run average with the symbol draw already inside it: the sequences where a card symbol was chosen and the sequences where a top character symbol was chosen are both in that average, blended together. So it cannot tell you what any single feature round will do, and the difference between two builds of this game is invisible across the handful of sequences a real session contains. It describes the machine, not your evening — and on a game whose variance sits in one pre-sequence draw, that distinction stops being academic.
Reading the figure is a two-step job here, because of the name rather than the maths. Open the game's own information pages from inside the game frame and take the return statement from there. Then, before you file it anywhere, check that the title string in the game header reads Rich Wilde and the Book of Dead in full. This shelf holds several games whose names differ by a single word, and a figure recorded against the wrong one is worse than no figure, because months later you will trust it.
Two cautions follow from how the game is distributed rather than how it plays. The build is selected at integration time, so a figure does not travel with you between casinos even on the same afternoon: the reading is per lobby, not per title. And if your build carries an optional mode or a purchase control, look for whether the information pages state a figure for that mode apart from base play — where they do, the base figure is not the one governing what you are doing. Neither point is an argument for hunting the highest build, only for knowing which one you are on.
Figures differ between builds and lobbies. Read the live game's information panel before you rely on any of them.
Play here →Volatility, the stake trade-off, and the max win cap
The provider markets this title on its feature, and the shape of the game tells you what that implies. A fixed-line, five-by-three board with no tumble engine, no progressive multiplier and no persistent state concentrates the interesting part of the return into a short, infrequent sequence. Ordinary spins on fixed lines do a lot of waiting. Read the volatility rating in the information panel, expect it at the upper end of whatever scale your build uses, and treat it as the warning label it is rather than a promise of size.
What that means for a bankroll decision is concrete. Because the return is concentrated, the gap between features is long and the variance within the feature is high for the reason given above — the symbol draw. A stake chosen so an ordinary losing stretch is survivable will feel too small when the feature finally arrives; a stake chosen so the feature feels worthwhile will not survive long enough to reach it often. No setting resolves that trade-off, and the only real decision is which side of it you accept before you start.
Check whether your build documents a maximum payout, and whether it is expressed as a multiple of stake or a currency amount. Then check what the rules say happens when a round reaches it: whether the remaining free spins still run, or the round terminates and pays immediately. On an expanding-symbol engine a ceiling is reached by one spin covering several reels at once, so the cap rule and the expansion rule interact — worth reading before a sequence rather than after one.
Three misreadings specific to this game, and the rule for each
The first is treating the Book as an ordinary wild. It is a wild and a scatter. Players who have internalised that wilds are plentiful and scatters are rare end up with an incoherent sense of how close they are to the feature, then over-stake on the belief that a trigger is imminent. The rule: count Books on screen as trigger progress, never as a reason to raise the stake, because the next spin's board is independent of this one's.
The second is assuming the expanding symbol is drawn per spin. It is drawn once per sequence. A reader who believes otherwise reads a weak first spin as bad luck the later spins can correct, when the ceiling for the sequence was set before it resolved. The rule: identify the chosen symbol on spin one, find its paytable entry, and you know the shape of the round you are in. That is information, not a reason to continue.
The third is importing figures between titles in this family. The engines look similar and the artwork rhymes, so a return figure, a cap or a retrigger condition read on one gets applied to another. The rule: an information panel is evidence about exactly one title in exactly one lobby. If the game header does not match the page you read the figure on, you do not have a figure.
A fourth habit is less a mistake than an omission: the feature round of a pokie and a casino's welcome offer are unrelated things that share the word bonus. The game's free spins are a documented part of its maths. A promotional free-spin allocation is an account condition with wagering, eligible-title and expiry rules attached, and those rules live on the operator's terms page, not in the game.
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Book of Dead against the rest of the shelf
Book of Dead started a shelf. Play'n GO followed it with further Egyptian-themed titles on recognisably related engines — Legacy of Dead, Rise of Dead, Scroll of Dead and Ghost of Dead among them — and the family is now large enough that a lobby search for "dead" returns a column of similar thumbnails. They are separate games with separate paytables, separate configurations and separate caps. The expanding-symbol idea is the shared ancestor, not a shared specification.
The differences that matter are structural and they are not visible in a tile. Later titles in the shelf vary the grid, the number of symbols that can be privileged at once, and the retrigger condition. Where Book of Dead draws one symbol for the sequence, a successor may handle several expanding symbols, which changes the distribution substantially without changing the artwork style at all. If you came to one of them expecting Book of Dead's behaviour, read its own rules before judging it.
The Rich Wilde name is a separate axis of confusion. It is a character brand rather than an engine, and the studio has attached it to titles that play nothing like this one — cluster and cascade mechanics, different grids, different feature logic. A game being a Rich Wilde game tells you about the theme and nothing about the maths. The full title in the game header is the only reliable identifier.
A reasonable rule for choosing among the shelf: pick on feature structure, not on theme. If you want the all-or-nothing single-draw sequence described here, this is the title that does it most purely; if you want more frequent, smaller feature outcomes, the shelf holds titles built differently and their own rule screens will say so.
On a phone, where it turns up, and what is not verified here
On a phone this game ports cleanly, because there is not much to port: a fixed-line five-reel board survives a narrow screen in a way a cascading grid does not. Two checks are still worth making first, and both come out of the sequence structure rather than out of general phone advice. Find the information menu, which on a narrow screen sits behind a control inside the game frame rather than beside the board, and confirm you can open the paytable without leaving a running sequence — while the feature is live you want to look up the chosen symbol's value without closing the game. Then note where the stake control sits relative to the spin button: on a fixed-line game the two are often adjacent, and a mis-tap changes the amount rather than the board.
Availability is the part this page will not assert. Whether a given operator carries this exact title, and which certified build it loaded, is a commercial arrangement that changes without notice and differs by jurisdiction. If Safe Casino or WinCrown is where you are looking, do the identification in the live lobby and in the game's own information pages rather than from anything written here; nothing on this page claims what either has loaded, at which configuration, or on what terms. Online casino services are not licensed in Australia, so any operator you reach from here is offshore.
What this page could not verify. Return configurations, the payline count, the maximum payout, the symbol paytable, the free-spin and retrigger counts and any optional mode all come from the loaded game and are not published here. The mechanical description — the dual-role Book, the single pre-sequence symbol draw, the additive retrigger on the same condition as entry, and the expansion across a reel — comes from Play'n GO's own description and is stable across builds. That is the part worth writing down. The numbers are the part worth reading yourself, in the lobby you are actually in, today.
Questions people actually ask
What is the RTP of Rich Wilde and the Book of Dead?
It depends which configuration your operator integrated. Play'n GO certifies releases at more than one return setting and the operator chooses one when it loads the game, so a figure quoted on a review page describes whichever build that writer happened to open. Take the return statement from the game's own information pages in the lobby you are playing in, and check the game header spells out the full title before you file the number against this game.
How does the expanding symbol in Book of Dead get chosen?
At random, once, before the free-spin sequence begins — not per spin. Play'n GO states that an ordinary symbol is picked to act as the Special Expanding Symbol for the entire sequence. Whether you were given a low card symbol or a top-paying character symbol largely sets the ceiling for that round before the first spin resolves.
Does the Book of Dead feature retrigger, and does the symbol change?
Play'n GO states that three Scatter Symbols trigger the free spins and that landing three or more again during the sequence awards a further allocation on the same condition, additively. It does not re-draw the expanding symbol — you keep the one you were given for the extended sequence. The spin count for entry and for the retrigger is stated in the loaded rule screen.
Is the Book symbol a wild or a scatter?
Both. It substitutes in ordinary combinations like a wild, and it also pays and triggers the feature by count rather than by position like a scatter. That dual role is why a single Book landing can complete a line win and advance your trigger count in the same spin, and why on-screen totals can look unrelated to the board.
Why does my Book of Dead bonus round pay almost nothing?
Usually because the symbol drawn for the sequence sits low on the paytable. The expansion mechanic multiplies that symbol's value across a reel, so a low-value draw can expand repeatedly, look dramatic and still return very little. A retrigger extends the same draw rather than replacing it, which is why a long round can also be a cheap one.
Is Book of Dead the same game as Legacy of Dead or the other Rich Wilde titles?
No. The 'of Dead' titles share an ancestor engine but have their own paytables, configurations, caps and retrigger conditions, and some privilege more than one symbol at a time. Rich Wilde is a character brand attached to games with entirely different mechanics. Use the full title in the game header as the identifier, and read that title's own rule screens.
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