How to Play Specialty Games Online

Specialty Games Is a Lobby Heading

Specialty games, sometimes labelled other games or instant games, is a category operators use for titles that do not fit under slots, table games or video poker. Its contents are a commercial choice, not a definition, and they vary between sites: keno, bingo variants, scratch cards and instant-win games, virtual sports and virtual racing, dice games, and one-off novelty products all appear under it at different operators. Because the heading is not a game type, nothing general can be said about the odds of what is under it, and the first useful step for a reader is to work out which kind of game a given title actually is.

The Rules That Apply Depend on the Game Type

The Gambling Commission's technical standards draw the lines that matter. For a casino game or a lottery, information enabling the customer to make an informed decision about their chances of winning must be easily available before they commit to gamble, in the form of a description of how the game works and how winners are determined, together with the house edge or margin, the return to player percentage, or the probability of winning events occurring.

For bingo and for some types of lottery or other game where the likelihood of winning cannot be determined because it depends on the eventual number of participants, the Commission accepts a description of the way in which prizes are allocated instead. For a virtual event such as a virtual race, the acceptable form is the house edge, margin or over-round, and the standards add that the odds displayed in virtual event betting should reflect the probability of each event occurring as closely as possible. For peer-to-peer games where the likelihood of winning may depend on skill or the actions of other participants, a description of how the game works and how winners are determined is sufficient.

Lotteries are treated differently again. The standards list the rules for entering a single lottery draw or a series of draws and the frequency of the draws among the explanatory content that should be considered, and where a lottery determines its result from an external event the outcome must be unpredictable and externally verifiable, unable to be influenced by the lottery operator, and publicly available.

Instant Win Games and Scratch Cards

Instant-win products are a supplied game category with studios behind them. Hacksaw Gaming lists instant win games and scratchcards alongside its slots, and describes its scratchcard range as more than 40 mobile-first titles with instant wins of up to €1.000.000 — one million euro, written in Hacksaw's own continental punctuation. Where a game uses a pre-determined layout, for example hidden prizes on a map, the Commission's implementation guidance says the locations of the winning spots should not change during play except as the rules provide, and the prohibition on letting a customer reduce the time until the result is presented does not extend to a scratch-all or reveal-all feature.

Dice and Ball Games

Several products filed under specialty at one operator sit under live casino at another. Evolution supplies Live Craps, Super Sic Bo, Bac Bo, Football Studio Dice and Fan Tan as live dealer dice and bead games, and describes Fan Tan as deriving its winning number from the random selection and careful ordering of beads into lines. Where an outcome is produced mechanically rather than by software, the standards treat it as a mechanical random number generator and add specific requirements: the mechanical pieces should be constructed of materials that prevent decomposition over time, the properties of the physical items used to make the selection should not be altered, and players should not be able to interact with, come into physical contact with, or manipulate the mechanics of the game.

Testing Applies to All of Them

Whatever heading a game is listed under, all gambling products must be tested by an approved test house before release, and online gambling games cannot be made available to players located in Great Britain unless sufficient testing has been carried out. Once a game is live, operators are required to check the performance of the games they offer to make sure the products are fair and achieving the designed return to player.