Sugar Cubes Slot: Overview

Founded in 2018, Dice Lab may not be widely recognised yet, though teaming up with Relax Gaming should raise their visibility. So far, they’ve largely flown under the radar, and their small catalogue includes a niche casino dice title called SlotDice, inspired by Yahtzee. Rather than tossing dice for bragging rights over your kid sister, it can pay up to 5,000 times the stake. It’s straightforward and clearly aimed at a particular audience. With Sugar Cubes, Dice Lab makes a notably confident move into slots through Relax Gaming’s Silverbullet platform.

True to the studio’s name, Dice Lab packs Sugar Cubes with dice visuals and nods throughout. The action takes place in a ‘dice lab’, with the six-sided pieces rolling along conveyor lines in the background. It’s filled with playful, sweet details like that, and much like SlotDice, it feels a bit quirky and different. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Sugar Cubes has a style and atmosphere that will click with certain players. The audience that immediately comes to mind is fans of Candy Crush-type titles and casual gamers. Candy Crush racked up close to 3 billion downloads in five years and brought in $34 million a month for its creator, so yes, that’s a huge crowd. Sugar Cubes channels that same energy, starting with its sensory impact. The visuals ooze sugary charm through the symbols and characters, creating an effect like tumbling into a bag of liquorice all sorts.

To set the 5×5 grid in motion, players pick stakes starting at 20 p/c and go up to $/€100 per spin. Dice Lab uses a cluster pays mechanic, where 4 or more touching symbols award a win. The 6 standard pay symbols are the six faces of a die – a white 1, a brown 2, a gold 3, a green 4, an orange 5, and a black 6. Working out payouts is made easy with a neat paytable approach: select the symbol you want, then adjust sliders for cluster size and bet level. At the low end, four ‘1s’ return 0.4x the stake, while at the top end, 16 sixes pay 3.2 times the stake.

By themselves, those symbol payouts aren’t exactly fortune-making, but Sugar Cube’s cascade feature is what helps build momentum. Each time a winning cluster hits, it disappears and new symbols drop into the gaps. It’s implemented well here, and a single spin can produce extended strings of wins. Helping matters further is a volatility rating of 4 out of 5, along with a higher-than-usual RTP of 97.06%. Overall, the maths and stats give the game a smooth rhythm with plenty of cascades, plus lots of special symbols to keep hits coming regularly.

Sugar Cubes Slot: Features

Sugar Cubes includes 4 Special Symbols designed to support the hit rate. First up is a wild shaped like a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. It substitutes for any of the standard dice symbols. Wilds can appear naturally on a fresh spin, and one is also created with every winning cluster.

After that comes the black-and-gold wand, the Magic Symbol. When two land adjacent, they convert everything in their path into the top symbol to form a cluster win. Then there’s the TNT icon, the Bomb – if two land next to each other, they blast surrounding symbols to create a cluster win. Lastly, the ‘S’ symbol acts as the scatter, and when 2, 3, 4, or 5 land beside each other they award 6, 9, 12, or 15 free spins respectively. The bonus round follows most of the same rules as the base game, with a few changes. One key difference is that no special symbols appear other than the wild.

At the beginning of each Free Spin, two gummy bears jump in front of the grid, each holding a die. The numbers shown on those dice are removed from the current spin. This boosts the likelihood of hitting wins with the four remaining dice symbols. If both bears display the same number, that symbol is removed and a wild is added to reels, along with one additional free spin. The bonus also features a win multiplier that starts at x1 and increases by +1 on every cascade. Unlike what you might be used to, though, the multiplier resets between each free spin.

Sugar Cubes Slot: Verdict

Sugar Cubes is an impressively polished debut slot from Dice Lab. It doesn’t come across as a deliberate attempt to create a blockbuster mega-hit, but Sugar Cubes still ends up feeling like a solid success. The visuals and theme align nicely with the studio name and their earlier release, giving the brand a consistent identity to build on. With maximum potential of just 1,003 times the stake, it won’t be the first choice for the hardcore crowd, yet it does have broad appeal. We brought up Candy Crush, and it’s easy to picture that audience gravitating toward a slot with a similar vibe.

The game’s playability comes from its likeable presentation and the steady supply of special symbols that keep things moving. You rarely get long stretches of dead spins that might cause attention to drift—the cascades and frequent special-symbol appearances prevent that. It’s not hard to imagine loads of commuters spinning Sugar Cubes on buses and trains on the way to work. The downside is that while wins happen often, they’re not especially lucrative, and even as you enjoy the constant activity, the game can gradually chip away at bankrolls. It is fairly volatile, after all.

As a first slot from a newly established studio, it’s a strong showing. Dice Lab seems to understand exactly who they’re aiming for, delivering a fitting sugary burst of entertainment. Not every slot needs to be a super-volatile, life-changing ride, and Sugar Cubes definitely isn’t that. Still, anyone wanting light, easy, app-style play at home or on the move should find plenty of fun moments and small thrills with Sugar Cubes.