A scatter is the exception to the payline rule. Where ordinary symbols must line up on an active payline to pay, a scatter counts wherever it lands — three or more anywhere on the screen typically pays a prize, triggers free spins, or both.
Why it matters
Scatters are usually the trigger for the part of the game people play for: the free spins round. The number needed and what they award is in the paytable, and the frequency with which they arrive is a large part of a game's volatility and hit frequency.
There is nothing to strategise here, and you cannot make scatters land more often, but knowing what triggers the feature helps you read a game before you stake on it.
Three things the paytable will tell you about scatters
- Which reels they can land on. Many five-reel games place scatters only on reels 1, 3 and 5, so the "two scatters, waiting for the third" tension is built from a fixed set of positions. A game whose scatters can land anywhere usually needs more of them to trigger.
- What each count pays. Three scatters typically opens the feature; four and five usually add a direct cash prize on top, and five is often the largest single scatter payout in the game — sometimes larger than the round it triggers is likely to return.
- Whether the feature retriggers. Inside the free spins, landing scatters again commonly adds spins (two for a partial hit, a full reset for the trigger count). Retriggers are where a bonus round's spread of outcomes widens most: a round that retriggers twice is a different event from the round you were promised, and the advertised maximum win usually assumes it.
Scatter pays is a different animal
A handful of very popular games — Sweet Bonanza and Gates of Olympus among them — use "scatter" to mean something else: every symbol pays by how many of it land anywhere on the grid, typically eight or more on 6×5, with no lines and no adjacency. That is a whole win mechanic rather than a special symbol, and it sits closer to cluster pays than to the scatter described above. The word is the same; the maths is not.