Aloha! Cluster Pays in detail
Aloha! Cluster Pays was released on 22 March 2016, the date NetEnt publishes on its own game page. Several secondary databases list 25 March instead: three days of drift with no practical consequence, but telling about the state of the data on this ageing catalogue. It was the studio's first title built around clusters rather than paylines, and it became the template for everything NetEnt produced in that register afterwards. The grid runs 6 reels by 5 rows, thirty positions in total. There are no lines: a win forms as soon as nine matching symbols touch horizontally or vertically, and a cluster can in theory cover the whole screen. The detail that changes everything is symbol size. The tiki masks, which are the premium symbols, occupy two positions each instead of one. A cluster of nine therefore builds far faster with them than with the low payers — coconuts, seashells, pineapples, flowers — which stand in for the usual card ranks here. The substitution symbol is a wooden crate marked with a question mark. It does not behave like a standard wild: it transforms into whichever adjacent symbol pays the most, which amounts to letting the game optimise the cluster for you. It can become any symbol except the Scatter, a postage stamp showing the game's own backdrop. The real engine of base play is Sticky Win Re-Spins. They trigger at random after a winning cluster: the cluster's symbols stay in place while everything else spins again. If the new draw enlarges the cluster, the added symbols lock in turn and another respin fires. The chain only stops when a respin adds nothing further, or when the cluster has filled the screen. None of those spins costs the player anything. Three to six Scatters trigger the free spins, awarding 9 to 12 rounds depending on the count, and the feature is retriggerable. It carries the Symbol Drop mechanic: as the rounds go by, the lowest-paying symbols are removed from the draw one at a time. The feature therefore gets mechanically better towards its end than at its start, which makes retriggers unusually valuable — a bare nine-spin trigger rarely gives the system time to do its work. On the numbers, NetEnt states 96.42% RTP, 700x the stake as maximum win, and a 21% hit rate. SlotCatalog holds a 2,000x ceiling instead: this page keeps the provider's value. On RTP, caution applies for a separate reason — this title belongs to the NetEnt catalogue shipped to operators in multiple tiers, and certified builds around 94% genuinely exist. Betting runs from €0.10 to €200 per spin. There is no bonus buy: the game predates the feature going mainstream, and NetEnt never revisited it.
