If you’re not familiar with roulette, firstly, are you a time traveller? Okay, now we have that settled, XXXtreme Lightning Roulette is a new and improved version of Evolution Gaming’s Lightning Roulette. This game has two new features – both different types of lightning strikes – and is much more volatile than its predecessor. This addition to Evolution’s live dealer gaming stable offers lightning-fast rounds, massive potential multipliers, and plays that will satisfy players with an appetite for risk.

Game composition

XXXtreme Lightning Roulette comprises an automatic standard European wheel with a single 0 and a standard table layout for placing bets. The difference between this and regular roulette is the three lightning strikes that happen after all bets are placed and before the ball lands. Each of these strikes can add various multipliers to random numbers on the board.

Gameplay

From a player perspective, this game works exactly like regular roulette. Players place their bets on single numbers, groups or colours, and the game resolves when the live dealer activates the wheel and the ball lands. However, this game’s major attraction is the lightning strikes that hit the board after betting is closed. Each of these types of lightning strike affects the board by applying various multipliers to random numbers. Once the ball has landed, any winning bets are paid out, and any straight number bets that have received one or more multipliers during the lightning strikes receive those as well.

Features

The highlight of XXXtreme Lightning Roulette is, of course, the series of lightning strikes that give players potential multipliers on their straight number bets. The three types of lightning strike, in order of appearance, are:

• Lightning: this is the original feature from Lightning Roulette, the game on which this one is based. This strike randomly selects up to five numbers on the board and applies multipliers from among 50x, 100x, 150x, 200x, 250x, 300x, 250x, 400x, and 500x.
• Chain Lightning: the first new addition to the original game, this strike can increase the amount of numbers with multipliers to up to 10.
• Double Strike: this final strike affects the numbers that have received multipliers, and can increase those multipliers to up to between 600x and 2000x.

Placing bets

You can place any type of bet that you would in standard European roulette, including French bets like voisins, tiers, orphelins and zero, and neighbour bets. (If none of this means anything to you, may we recommend reading our guide to roulette?) However, only straight-number bets qualify to win the multipliers applied during the lightning rounds.

As with regular live-dealer online roulette, all bets are placed before the dealer activates the wheel and ball.

Strategies and tips

Before discussing strategy, it’s important to note two things about this game:

• As mentioned above, multipliers only pay out on straight numbers
• Payouts for all bets are lower than standard roulette

With these two facts in mind, it makes sense to focus on placing only straight-number bets, right? After all, this is the only way to get multipliers. This is definitely a valid strategy, but it’s also one that could eat away at your bankroll a lot faster than you’d like. Firstly, to make sure you get at least one multiplier (and preferably more), you would need to place bets on more than one single number. The more numbers you play, the more chances at winning, but you’re also risking bigger losses.

Playing a hedging strategy may help mitigate these losses and increase your potential wins. By splitting your bets between straight numbers and groupings, you can mitigate a loss on the former with wins on the latter. The outside/inside/French bets can also add a nice bonus on top of multiplier wins.

This game is compatible with desktop, laptop and mobile devices, and can be played on all standard operating systems.