Gates of Olympus

The god on the reels

Zeus isn’t decoration in this game. He fills the right side of the screen with white hair and beard, gold armour on his chest and arms, and lightning crackling down from his fist. Behind him a palace sits on a bank of cloud under a pink and violet sky. Marble columns stand at both edges with a bowl of fire burning on top of each one. The reels sit in a heavy gold frame.

The symbols are the treasure of the gods. Coloured gems fill most of the grid, and a golden crown on red and an hourglass join them. The scatter is Zeus again, his own face on a tile with the word scatter under it. The multipliers fall as round orbs with small gold wings, and each one shows its value. You’ll know a multiplier the moment it lands.

Pragmatic Play’s launch news gave Zeus a job as well as a pose. He calls the multiplier orbs down at random in the base game and in the free spins. The god on the screen is the reason a win gets multiplied. In my book that matters. A god who only poses adds nothing.

This Zeus became the face of the family. The Gates of Olympus series on this site runs to 9 games, and Zeus is on every one of them. Gates of Olympus 1000 lifts his multipliers to 1,000x, and other versions dress him for Christmas or hand him dice. The first game is still the plainest of them.

The reels

Now, the grid has 6 reels of 5 rows and no paylines at all. You don’t follow any line here. 8 or more matching symbols anywhere on the screen make a win. The winning symbols then vanish, the ones above drop into the gaps, and new symbols fall in from the top. Pragmatic Play calls this the tumble feature, and one spin can pay several times over before it stops. A tumble costs nothing extra.

The multiplier orbs can land on any spin and on any tumble. In the base game their values are added together once the tumbles stop, and the total multiplies the win of that spin. An orb on a spin that pays nothing does nothing at all. The values run from 2x to 500x.

The free spins

4 or more scatters anywhere on the screen give you 15 free spins. Here the multipliers stop resetting. Every orb that lands on a winning spin adds its value to a running total, and the whole total multiplies that win. Spins without a new orb pay at face value. 3 or more scatters during the round add 5 spins. The total only grows.

The bought bonus

Gates of Olympus sells its free spins for 100x the stake. At the lowest stake of $0.20 you pay $20 for the round, and at $1 a spin you pay $100. The demo rules print the same 96.50% for the bought round as for the game itself. A bought bonus doesn’t change the percentage. It only skips the wait for the scatters.

Now, the ante does the opposite job. It adds a quarter to every spin, so a $1 stake becomes $1.25, and by the game’s rules it doubles the chance of free spins arriving on their own. With the ante switched on, the round can’t be bought. You choose one route or the other.

The numbers

Pragmatic Play publishes one return for Gates of Olympus, 96.50%, and the rules inside the demo carried the same figure on 30 September 2026. The intro screen of the demo labels the game medium volatility. Mind you, the launch news of 2021 called it highly volatile. This page goes by the label in the game.

The demo takes stakes between $0.20 and $240. The biggest win the game can pay is 5,000x your stake, so $1,000 on a $0.20 spin and $5,000 on a $1 spin. Gates of Olympus 1000 lifts that cap to 15,000x. Your stake sets the size of a win and never the odds.

Regulars on the slot floor raised the stake whenever they felt a feature was “due”. The machines never noticed. On Gates of Olympus the scatters land just as often at $0.20 as at $240, unless the ante is on.

The score

Score: 8.0 out of 10. Zeus earns half a point for real work on the reels, and the 96.50% return earns another half. The free spins earn a half for a multiplier that only climbs. The 5,000x cap earns nothing, with newer games in the family reaching 25,000x.

Sources

All the figures above come from Pragmatic Play, from its own pages and from the rules inside the demo.

• Gates of Olympus game page at Pragmatic Play, read 30 September 2026
• Gates of Olympus launch news from Pragmatic Play, read 30 September 2026
• Gates of Olympus demo with the game rules, opened 30 September 2026

The rules behind every review here, the score included, are set out on How the Reviews Work.