Jewel Blast

Have you ever made a great play while noodling around on Bejeweled and wished you would win money for it? Well, now you can – with Jewel Blast, a fun video slot machine game from Quickspin that's available online right now; no download necessary.

The game has five reels and three rows, each symbol in its own bubble in a floating grid against a relaxing, abstract color background. There are 25 pay lines, whose indicators are nothing more than tiny fuchsia dots along the sides of the screen.

There are two different kinds of icons used in this game – low-win playing card symbols of ace, king, queen, jack and ten; and higher-win jewel shapes in violet, green, yellow, red and blue/diamond. Although there are two levels of pay outs, they're not big wins, ranging from .08 to two coins. The maximum win is listed at 50,000 coins, but we're not quite sure how it gets there unless you bet the maximum of 100 coins all the time, which can be costly on a medium-variance game with (an admittedly solid) 96.57% return to player ratio.

The wins themselves trigger amazing graphics, though, so there's that! It's like if the movie Xanadu had a slot machine.

Even the regular gameplay wild icon doesn't pay much, from 1.60 to 20. But it can substitute for any icon (except bonuses) you need to make a win. As for the Blast Bonus, the icon is a bubble that reads BONUS WILD, and you need only two of these symbols to trigger the bonus, where all symbols next to the Bonus Wild are exploded out by a Blast Wave, and new symbols drop down from the top of the screen to create a full grid.