Play enough slot machines, and you’ll begin to notice some design elements that repeat across slots. One is that many slot machines rely on letter/number symbols lined up with the values of playing cards, generally using the numbers 8, 9 and 10 and letters J, Q, K and A.
These align with the rankings of playing cards (Ace being the highest and go down from there), but you’ll also notice these tend to pay less than premium symbols, which rank above them.
These tend to go by a couple of names, as do a lot of things pertaining to slots, depending on the game maker. They’re often called Royal Symbols, or Poker Symbols, reflective of their links to those playing cards.
The use of these symbols is to offer players a helpful guide to how the pay table on a slot works. This is very similar to the use of bars, cherries, lemons and 7s as symbols, for similar reasons – these symbols have a familiar hierarchy to players and therefore they know how they work and where they more or less fall in the pecking order of slot machine payouts.
In the case of royal symbols, it tends to go a step further. Most manufacturers use the same color scheme – a green 9, an orange K, etc. Many times they’re adorned similarly with crowns and diamonds and other symbols, so they look somewhat familiar. Having enough variations also helps because the number of slot symbols that a game can feature has grown over time.
This wasn’t always the case – WMS, for instance, had a four suit set of poker symbols before shifting to the more traditional card value setup. Over time, most of the makers have gravitated to a similar set of symbols.
In this way slot makers are using design cues that are designed to inform players without requiring them to read a pay table, similar to how better paying symbols take up more of the space on the reels (with bonus symbols oftentimes bleeding outside their space on the reel). That, too, helps players know what the better paying symbols are.
Design takes on a lot of forms, and the use of common elements like these can be helpful to inform players what’s going on, without having to create an entirely new set of symbols for every slot that comes out.
