If you have not heard of Yggdrasil Gaming don’t worry, you are not be alone. Despite being in business since 2013 the company is not always the first on people’s lips when online slot developers are being discussed.
This is no reflection on their standard of work though; Yggdrasil’s products can be found at some of the best online casinos on the internet, and players love them once they find them.
They are considered one of the new breed of top online slot developers, known for their innovative in game features and game mechanics and exceptional artwork.
In fact, you could argue that Yggdrasil are one of the most inventive developers in the industry with the number of game mechanics and in game features they are coming up with, not to mention the fantastic work that goes on behind the scenes.
As for the name, Yggdrasil refers to an immense and sacred tree in Norse cosmology, and it is pronounced ig-dra-sil.
Best Yggdrasil Casino Sites
Best Yggdrasil Slots
With a highly diverse range of fascinating slot titles, Yggdrasil Gaming has steadily forged a stellar reputation for itself as the game library has grown, with their slots attracting a huge number of fans.
They have around 100 games available including jackpots, 3 reels and 5 reels, and many with their own in house game mechanics.
Let’s take a look at some of their biggest and most popular slots below:
Brazil Bomba
Based around a Rio de Janeiro Brazilian carnival atmosphere, this slot boasts a highly engaging and enticing plotline to go with its high volatility.
With an avalanche of cascading symbols and a 96.3 percent RTP (Return To Player) rate, this slot doesn’t work in the traditional way with reels and paylines.
Instead, wins are formed by landing 6 or more symbols in a cluster – the bigger the cluster the bigger the win.
The game also adds multipliers for consecutive wins, and during the freespins round you can really start seeing the money come in thanks to this.
Time Travel Tigers
Released in February 2020, this is one of the newer online slots to be released by Yggdrasil Gaming to the marketplace, though already it has amassed a loyal player following.
The base game has 25 paylines, high volatility, and an interesting free spin feature which will take you to one of four eras; Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, Aztec South America or far off into the future.
What’s more, with a maximum payout of 388,000 Euros and an industry average RTP of 96.3%, this is definitely a game worth investigating.
Aldo’s Journey
Having first come out in November 2019, this represents the company’s continued quest to bring quality to the marketplace by offering a story element to their games.
Equipped with 65 paylines and an RTP of 96.1%, Aldo takes players to countries as far and wide as Italy, China, Mongolia and Persia on a quest for money, so it is in the same vein as Time Travel Tigers above.
Aldo himself is wild and hops around the board as a fun animation, dishing out wilds left right and centre, and there is also a freespins feature.
It’s a simple game by Yggdrasil’s standards, but absolutely full of fun.
9K Yeti
This was a co-production with 4ThePlayer, a well known developer of mostly mobile games, but in terms of graphics this game has some of the best of any slot currently out there, focusing on the ascent of Mount Everest set against a stunning visual backdrop.
Equipped with a massive 4096 ways to win and a good return to player rate of 97%, 9K Yeti certainly has the potential to be one of those slots that is around for a very long time.
It also has the potential to be free spins central with up to 88 of them potentially available during each feature, as well as them be retriggerable.
Age of Asgard
Released in October 2019, this slot has more of a niche collection of fans, though it is easy to understand why they like it.
It has 40 paylines increasing to 50 during free spins, and there are also respins and wilds that automatically nudge to fill the whole reel.
The bonus features are too complicated to explain here, but they involve opposing wilds effectively battling it out, creating the potential for almost €500k as a max win.
The RTP is fairly standard at 96.2% and this is another ranking as high volatility.
Champions of Rome
A gladiator of a slot, this was first released to the market in February 2019 and gained a significant amount of traction.
Champions of Rome focuses on the gladiatorial arena in Rome where a gladiator will fight for your cause with their specific wild formation. Wilds are, in fact, what this slot is all about.
Featuring 20 lines as well as symbols galore, one of the selling points is that you are able to choose your own risk level in the free spins, and there is a bonus buy available too.
It’s a mid to high volatility game with a 96.4% RTP.
Orient Express
Based around the most iconic train in the world, the Orient Express slot game takes you from Paris east across Europe, working your way through Venice, Belgrade and ending in Istanbul.
Each city boasts its own unique features including walking wilds, win multipliers, wild reels and random wilds, but it is the free spins which are the real novelty as they can unlock a number of high yield bonus rounds.
Released in 2017, it does not look likely that this slot will run out of steam, with its 20 paylines and a maximum payout of fantastic 500,000 Euros should you hit the jackpot.
Valley of the Gods
Released in August 2017, this slot proved an instant hit with its respins on winning spins and €580,000 max win potential.
Boasting a terrific 3125 ways to win, Valley of the Gods is full of ancient mysteries and curious incantations that will cast their spell on you, so long as you can withstand its’ high volatility.
Packed with colour and highly interactive, this was such a successful title that there was even a sequel released in 2020 named… wait for it… Valley of the Gods 2.
Who knows, this could even turn out to be a series from Yggdrasil.
Yggdrasil Products and Features
An igaming company needs to ultimately make games that players will love and be excited by, and this means investing in and creating new technology that can support boundary pushing game features.
However, developers also need to appeal to their direct clients, the operators they will be doing business with, and they do this by making sure their software is easily integrated and comes with minimal disruption.
Some of Yggdrasil’s products, tech, and solutions are explained in brief below:
BOOST & BRAG
A great example of player acquisition, engagement and retention working in perfect harmony with innovation, BOOST is a set of tools developed by Yggdrasil to enable in game promotional features.
These are fantastic for the player because who doesn’t like extra ways to win? But they are also beneficial for operators who can substantially diversify their game library by choosing Yggdrasil as a partner.
This sort of thing is exactly what Yggdrasil is all about; playing with the ‘rules’ and leading the industry in exciting new directions.
These come at no extra cost and include:
- Prize Drops – Coming in different formats, this real time cash reward campaign is designed so that a prize drop can occur on any qualifying spin, adding an extra dimension to standard slots and increasing engagement.
- Missions – Typical of Yggdrasil’s creative thinking, missions bring the best of the gamification world to online slots. Clients can assign hundreds of missions across multiple different games making each player’s experience truly unique, and giving them something extra to play for.
- Tournaments – These are nothing new in and of themselves but Yggdrasil have various different leader board criteria which sets their tournaments apart.
Tagged on to BOOST is BRAG, a player facing element allowing people to share replays of big wins on their social media channels.
This creates organic promotion as the player is essentially advertising the game with their own network.
GATI
The company’s new GATI solution means that its highly successful YG Masters Program, which enables studios around the world as well as game developer partners to get instant access to standardised game engines and game technology, have a much faster route to market.
This new technology also means that the company’s partners can gain instant access to the platform so that they can then create their own content in addition to making changes and adapting their current games. Furthermore, they can also develop their own game servers, while the code remains the same and crucially stays private and secure.
These servers can be created in any technology and coding language, with partners being able to easily integrate many different games at any one time. Furthermore, GATI is also continually updated and tested from RTP (Return To Player), analytics and cloud deployment, with new features being added for these elements.
Game Mechanics
Specific to their slot games, there are several different game mechanics developed exclusively for Yggdrasil titles which break new ground in the online gaming industry.
These change the way slots traditionally operate by adapting gameplay to make it more exciting and dynamic, at the same time as balancing these new features with the maths behind each title.
If they prove popular enough they may well be licensed out in the same way that other developers license Megaways from BTG, but for the moment, the following game mechanics are exclusive to Yggdrasil:
- Splitz – Special symbols which can reveal multiple standard symbols on a single space on the reel. This can create wins where none existed before and significantly increase the value of winning paylines.
- MultiMax – This one gives each reel a multiplier. Each reel’s multiplier increases when a symbol that forms a winning combination lands on that reel. These multipliers are then added to the win. Plus, each multiplier multiplies the last, so if reel 1 has a x2 multiplier and turns a £5 win to £10, reel 2 would turn that £10 to £20 assuming it too had a x2 multiplier.
- Gigablox – This one is all about huge symbols. If a huge symbol is part of a winning payline it breaks into many smaller versions of the same symbol, creating multiple wins and huge payouts.
These game mechanics are available on a number of Yggdrasil slots, while others have more typical gameplay.
History of Yggdrasil Gaming
Yggdrasil Gaming was something of a latecomer to the world of online gambling in the software space, having been founded in 2013.
After receiving its first license for B2B trade from the Malta Gaming Authority in 2014, the company was quick to build on this progress and was soon supplying software services to online casinos who were under this jurisdiction.
Like a lot of software companies to the online gambling industry, Yggdrasil started developing their slots using the widely available Flash technology that was particularly prevalent around the time. Although they were able to hit the ground running using Flash, they soon moved on to the more versatile HTML 5 platform in 2014, putting them ahead of the crowd and enabling them to create more multifaceted and interactive games that would appeal to increasingly demanding slot players.
If anything, their youth was an asset here as they were not weighed down by hundreds of already developed slots which relied on rapidly outdating technology, and were nimble enough to hop across to HTML 5 quickly. More established developers would have a lot of work to do updating older titles.
In conjunction with this move, the company also developed their own ISENSE client framework which was HTML5 optimised for seamless cross platform functionality, industry leading loading times, as well as access to in game promotional tools known as BOOST.
Google Cloud Migration & Awards
The company’s innovative approach to igaming was rewarded in 2016 when Yggdrasil won the IGA Innovator of the Year Award, a gong they would go on to win four years in a row up to 2020.
Two years after this they also paid out their largest ever jackpot of €7.8 million, so players who were somehow still unaware of the company had to sit up and take notice. They also announced plans to enter the word of online bingo in 2018, although progress since then was slow, with no product to speak of until 2021.
Arguably the biggest move the company have made since their inception is their migration to the cloud, which began in 2020.
This was a future proofing effort by Yggdrasil and also served to improve scalability and efficiency when it came to their game and product software development, not to mention being cost saving in the long term.
From their B2B clients’ point of view it was of huge benefit, as the time taken to set up new nodes of their decentralised aggregation network shrank from weeks to hours.
Of equal benefit to B2B clients and players is the fact that the creative geniuses at Yggdrasil can also develop games much faster, which means more new content more often.
This has set the company apart from its competitors in an industry where differentiation is absolutely key, and being the first software provider to do this gives them an edge. What operators find vital is that they have a developer who can deliver quickly, keeping them ahead of the game.
There can be no doubt that the company now boasts one of the most advanced and revolutionary logistical initiatives in the industry. It will enable the business to get a better handle on cost regulation, while having the flexibility to scale up and down, where and when it feels that it is necessary, without it needing to spend on hardware resources.
Contact
Yggdrasil have offices all over Europe:
- Sweden: Fredriksdalsgaten 22, 120 32 Stockholm
- Poland: Lubicz 17i, 31-503 Krakow, Poland
- Malta: Tagliaferro Business Centre, L2 High Street c/w Gaiety Lane, Sliema, SLM 1551
- Gibraltar: Europort Road, Suite 842 B&C, Gibraltar, GX11 1AA
Alternatively, you can use the contact form on their website and you will be put in touch with the relevant person for your enquiry.