The Bigwinboard Awards 2021: All the Winners

With that, 2021 has just about concluded, pulling the curtains on a great year for online slots. It's been a real mixed bag of highs and lows as usual, but there was a feeling a bunch of studios really stepped it up, pulling out all the stops to wow players with new features, fascinating theme selection, and masses of winning potential. Hovering above all of them was one clear cut next level winner...

Before getting to the deets, a quick acknowledgement of all the players and readers who participated in The Bigwinboard Awards 2021. Through it all, we've shared our honest thoughts on the slots we judged to be great or not so great, and we were thrilled to find out which games players would prefer to insert their hard-earned coins into. These awards present the unfiltered favourites of real players with zero industry influence - the way it has and always will be at Bigwinboard.

Voting began on November 18 and ended on December 14, giving our esteemed readers a chance to have their say. Every vote registered was automatically and manually checked (IP, user agent, time, etc) for abnormal voting methods. Big thanks to the thousands of votes cast (3388 to be exact), and without further ado, let's reveal 2021's champs.

San Quentin xWays

We encountered San Quentin xWays in the first week of 2021, and even then, it had all the markings of being slot of the year. This absolute monster of a game dropped a titanic challenge that plenty of players were more than willing to take up. And it didn't take long for the insane win clips to start rolling through, with one Bigwinboard community member being the first to hit the 150,000x win cap in February after others came tantalisingly close.

Aside from the titanic winning potential, San Quentin rolled a stack of innovative features into one frighteningly good package. The base game has its fair share of them, but it all comes together during the bonus round, making triggering it a enticing proposal indeed. This led to another controversial talking point - the 2,000x bonus buy nuclear option. However, the studio wasn't done and San Quentin xWays turned out to be an early taster of the sort of journey Nolimit City would take players on in 2021.

Nolimit City

While there appeared to be a general uptick in quality this year, one studio rose above them all. Nolimit City spent almost the entirety of 2021 comfortably making its home in places most others would never dare to tread. Despite a certain sense of destiny surrounding Nolimit City taking out Provider of the year, the studio's absolute dominance is breath-taking.

One of the learnings from Nolimit City's achievement is that Bigwinboard readers clearly have an appreciation for a studio not afraid to hang everything out there for all to see. A team of creatives that not only likes to push the envelope but seems more comfortable chilling out there where things are weird, wonderful, and unpredictable. We never knew where the fudge Nolimit City would lead us next, and the destination might not be to everyone's taste, but the provider could be counted on to create a memorable ride getting there.

East Coast vs West Coast

Ever get the impression some providers view soundtracks as an unloved afterthought that gets shoved onto a game last-minute from a library of stock effects? Not so others who have cottoned on to just how much a banging tune can enhance the whole experience. None more so than, you guessed it, Nolimit City.

Hanging in the bowels of the studio, surrounded by banks of monitors, mixing desks, and other engineering equipment (we imagine), sits the enigmatic Swede David. He's the mix master behind cracking tunes like Deadwood and this year's winner East Coast vs West Coast, which captured the hip hop spirit of the game to an absolute tee. The secret in David's words was 'I don't settle with lame samples and stock beats, if I'm going to create real hip hop it should be real hip hop.' An approach that paid handsome dividends this year.