Cashed in Stone: Overview

SG Digital developer Core Gaming clearly enjoys looking back in time, and this outing goes right to the very beginning. If you’re talking human history, it doesn’t get much earlier than the Stone Age, which is exactly where Cashed in Stone takes place. It’s a cartoonish land of heavy-browed cavemen clobbering each other with dinosaur bones. The last Core Gaming release we reviewed was Viking Hoard, a slot that demanded serious patience and resilience. So, it was with a bit of apprehension that we loaded up Cashed in Stone.

On the visual side, “prehistoric” is a fair description—especially for the UI. The overall graphical quality isn’t particularly strong, though the softly rolling background hills are easy on the eye. Cashed in Stone also brings along a mascot: a small, adorable caveman who’s vaguely reminiscent of Animal from the Muppets. He injects some much-needed humour into what might otherwise have felt like a stiff, dry slot. The game runs on a 6 reel, 4 row layout with 4,096 ways to win. Like Viking Hoard, symbols drop in and the game uses a cascading win mechanic. Winning symbols disappear, allowing new ones to fall and potentially create win chains from a single spin. Bets range from 25 p/c up to $/€100 per spin, and it plays on pretty much any device.

Wins are made by landing 3 or more matching symbols. The paytable includes 10 symbols—A royals plus a set of higher-paying icons. These include a meaty bone, a stone axe, a necklace, and a BAR symbol. The top payout belongs to the Logo, which only requires two matching symbols and awards 40 times the stake for a six of a kind hit. Because of key elements we’ll cover, RTP can vary from 96% down to a notably low 91.95%. Volatility sits in the low/medium bracket, though it can feel fairly punchy at times—just not to the same dull, drawn-out extremes that Viking Hoard could deliver. Completing the paytable is the wild, which substitutes for any standard paying symbol.

Cashed in Stone: Features

Cashed in Stone packs in an unexpectedly large set of features, and a few of them even involve player choice. You’ll find reel modifiers, collectable free spins, plus a bonus game for extra variety. Starting with the modifiers, there are four that can randomly show up on any base game spin. They are:

• Stackin’ Wilds: a random number of reels become fully wild. If they contribute to a win, they are removed during the cascade.
• Multiplyin’ Times: a win multiplier appears and increases with each winning cascade within a single spin.
• Cashin’ Drop: one paying symbol is chosen and dropped onto the reels in an oversized 3×3 format.
• Smashin’ Wilds: the caveman smashes symbols to transform them into wilds.

The caveman symbol acts as the scatter, and landing three on the screen activates the Big Money Wheel Bonus round. In this feature, you spin a two-level prize wheel. The first wheel is divided into multiplier slices from x1 – x5. When it lands on a multiplier, it’s applied to the total bet and may then turn into a red cross. The wheel continues to spin and stack up winnings unless it lands on a red cross, which ends the bonus. There’s also a green arrow segment—if that’s hit, it opens the second-tier wheel, which follows the same rules but offers multipliers of x10 – x250.

The final notable feature is the Free Spins system, which is a bit more involved than usual. Each time a free spins symbol lands, it advances the spins trail by one step. The trail is split into three parts; the bottom section awards 1-5 free spins with 2 guaranteed wilds each. The middle section grants 5-10 free spins with three wilds. The top section gives 10 free spins with a 2×2 wild on every spin. Players may choose to start their banked free spins whenever they like by pressing the green button below the trail. The only exception is the final section, which triggers automatically once reached. A notable twist is that when free spins begin, the stake used is calculated as the average of all bets placed in the game up to that moment. Free spins cannot be retriggered.

Cashed in Stone: Verdict

Within a handful of spins, memories of Viking Hoard came rushing back like a sudden Nam flashback. Recalling how much effort it took to trigger features in that game, one thought popped up—are we really doing this again? Thankfully, Cashed in Stone drops its features more often. The math model feels like the “ruthlessness” dial has been turned down, which is a welcome change. Even so, you’ll still need patience. Reaching the end of the free spins trail can require a lot of spins, and the free spins setup is likely to divide opinion.

Choosing to trigger smaller batches of free spins significantly drags down the RTP. It can sink to an ugly 91.95%. On the other hand, if you decide to push all the way to the end, you’ll need to accept the time and bankroll commitment required to get there. So, does it pay off? Potentially, as the game is capped at 250,000 from one spin, which is substantial. In practical terms, though, most players are probably looking at maximum outcomes closer to around 5,000 times the stake.

Cashed in Stone isn’t a straight clone of Viking Hoard, but the overlap is hard to miss. The biggest issue is that the same irritations that plagued Viking Hoard are still present here. The visuals feel awkward, and the base game pace can be painfully slow. On the plus side, you’re likely to see more features in Cashed in Stone than you did in Viking Hoard. Even with the little caveman doing his best to keep things light, Cashed in Stone simply isn’t that entertaining to play. Prehistory enthusiasts may get something out of it, and it’s a step up for Core Gaming. Overall, Cashed in Stone is more enjoyable than Viking Hoard was, but it’s still about as fun as taking a dinosaur bone to the head.