Look at just about any online bingo site, and you’ll see one or more games titled Book Of. The range is vast, covering all kinds of settings, themes, and features, and yet, you wouldn’t normally associate books with bingo or bingo slots. Sure, you play bingo from a book of tickets, but that’s about as far as it goes. So, what is the Book Of series that’s apparently popular enough to have multiple installments at bingo sites.
From One Game to Many
Across the collection of slots and bingo at Paddy Power, you’ll find many different themes and features well represented. Deal or No Deal, for example, has bingo rooms, slot games, and slingo games on the platform. You’ll also find lots of slots with the fishing feature, such as Big Bass Splash, where the goal is to get to the feature, land cash-holding fish as well as a fisherman wild symbol, and collect the lot.
The Book Of range has 13 games at the time of writing, but many of them aren’t true sequels or spinoffs from the original. The first in the Book Of collection that spawned this online bingo game trend was Rich Wilde and the Book of Dead. Set in an Ancient Egyptian pyramid, you play as the titular explorer in search of the Book of Dead. To do this, you need three of the Book of Dead symbols. Then, you go to the feature that the Book Of name is all about.
In it, one symbol is marked as an expanding symbol. Whenever it lands, it expands to cover the whole reel. Get the highest-paying symbol as your expanding symbol and hit a five-symbol win line, and you’ll get the game’s highest payout. So, it’s not so much about the Book of the Dead that the British Museum writes about, but rather a feature from a game that sets its story around collecting the book and unlocking its secrets.
A Very Adaptable Game Series
The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead was a collection of writings on preparing important people for the afterlife, covering everything from mummification to funerary rites. Naturally, with the original game being in this setting, many other Book Of games feature Ancient Egypt and the civilization’s mythology.
John Hunter and the Book of Tut, Book of Tut Megaways, Book of Ra Deluxe, and Book of Slingo all put a twist on the formula within the same setting. Looking to combine a beloved film from the 1990s and the trending feature, along came The Mummy: Books of Amun Ra.
Even in more recent reviews from the likes of The Guardian, The Mummy film is still very much appreciated. Combining lovably goofy action and very charismatic characters, it has stood the test of time. So, it only makes sense that slot developers would incorporate this most famed of Egyptian films into a slot of the same theme.
It’s not a strictly Ancient Egyptian game series anymore, though. Book of El Dorado gives it a distinctly ancient Mesoamerican theme, while Paddy Power Gold Book of Luck is all about Irish folklore. Then Age of the Gods: Book of Oracle brings the series to Ancient Greece.
The core Book Of feature is what the players come for, and the range of additional mechanics and settings offers those players a lot of choice. Through this, the series has become an online bingo staple.