Who’s behind it

I’m Tom Ashby. I’ve worked in online gambling since 2005, starting as an analyst on the operator side and later in affiliate marketing. Over that time I’ve worked for operators large and small, including startups that didn’t survive, and watched brands rise and vanish, markets open and close overnight and UK regulation tighten considerably.

The games have changed even more. When I started, an online casino usually ran on a single supplier: you had a Microgaming casino or a Playtech casino, games ran in Flash on a desktop, and a lot of the effort inside operators went into simply letting one account work across casino, poker and sports betting. Today one lobby carries games from dozens of studios, everything runs in HTML5 on your phone, and the last ten years in particular have brought an explosion of features.

Some studios keep pushing what a slot can do. Nolimit City is a favourite of mine for exactly that reason, though I still have a soft spot for some of the old, simple classics. Other studios reskin the same template every few weeks. Both kinds end up side by side in casino lobbies of 2,000 or 3,000 games, which nearly all look the same, with very little to tell you which games are genuinely doing something new.

Why Slotathon exists

Slotathon started around 2016 as a free-play demo site. When UK rules changed in 2019 to require proper age verification before anyone could play a free demo, doing that properly was more complicated and expensive than a small site could justify, so I blocked UK visitors and the site went quiet. I relaunched it in September 2026 as something different: a site about how the games work.

The gap I wanted to fill is one I kept running into myself. Most sites will tell you a game “has multipliers” and stop there. But one multiplier adds and another multiplies. In The Dog House, multiplier Wilds worth x2 and x3 on the same winning payline combine to make x5. In Buffalo King’s Free Spins, the same values combine to make x6 because they’re multiplied together. That’s the level of detail Slotathon goes into.

Longer term, I’d like that detail to answer a question nobody answers well at the moment: if you like how a particular game plays, especially one that isn’t a household name, what else works the same way?

The thing that surprised me most

Most UK casinos offer the same games from the same studios, so one lobby looks much like another. What can differ is the return to player. Some games have several documented RTP configurations, and the version offered can differ between casinos.

In September 2026 I checked 13 games across 11 UK casinos and screenshotted the RTP each one displayed. The same game often showed a noticeably different figure from one casino to the next. I’ve been in this industry for twenty years and I didn’t realise the spread was that wide, so I doubt most players do. Every reading, with its date, is on the RTP study page.

It’s worth keeping an eye on. Remote gaming duty in Great Britain rose from 21% to 40% in April 2026, and it’s a fair question whether some of that cost will reach players through the settings casinos choose. One sample can’t answer that, but it is a baseline, and I’ll recheck the same games so any change is visible.

How I check things

I work from each game’s own rules and paytables, plus the game sheets and certification files that developers share with industry partners, which often explain a feature in more detail than the public game page does. Then I look at the games myself on verified player accounts at UK-licensed casinos, mostly in demo mode. Where sources disagree, or a UK version works differently from the international one, I say so.

I use AI tools to help organise the research and draft pages, and I check what they produce against the sources. There’s more detail on the How we research page.

On many of the slot-mechanics guides, you can also choose two games and compare how they handle the same feature side by side. I built that comparison tool, called Slotathon Face-Off, using the research behind the articles.

The small print

Slotathon is written for readers in Great Britain. It has no casino partnerships or affiliate links, and if that ever changes it will be clearly marked. Explaining a game isn’t a recommendation to play it. If gambling is causing problems for you or someone close to you, Safer Gambling Support lists organisations that can help.

If you spot something wrong, or have evidence that would improve a page, get in touch. Pages get updated when the evidence changes.