Relax Gaming Bingo Sites
Relax Gaming was started in 2010 which makes it a relative newcomer to the world of iGaming. The company’s original offices were in Tallinn, on the Baltic coast of Estonia, and although they are still based there they also now have a presence in Malta, Barcelona, Finland, Sweden and the UK. They started out with poker software and in 2014 they partnered with Unibet to bring out a new and innovative poker platform.
Until the summer of 2015 the Unibet owned sites had bingo courtesy of the Virtue Fusion network but a few months before the contract with Playtech was up for renewal, the announcement was made that it was not going to be renewed, and Unibet would be going with a brand new bingo platform and network produced by Relax. In summer 2015 the new network went live at Maria Casino (or just Maria as it was then called).
In its first year of existence the new network, which powers some Scandinavian facing bingo sites as well as the UK friendly Unibet and Bingo.com, sold more than half a billion bingo tickets and paid out more than 10 million euros in jackpots.
The Relax Bingo network has several open access bingo rooms including regular and speed 90 ball rooms, 75 ball and 75 ball variant (5 line) rooms, and there’s also a newbie room. There are a couple of idiosyncrasies with ticket purchasing; in some of the 5 line rooms the ticket price is for a strip of 3 tickets and it is not possible to buy individual cards, whereas in the 90 ball rooms the tickets do not come in strips at all.
The Relax bingo product has a pre-buy facility as powerful as that at Playtech bingo sites, allowing tickets for any bingo game (apart from free games) to be purchased up to 7 days in advance.
There are a few special features at Relax bingo sites that you won’t find on any other platform and these are mostly to do with transparency and fair play. Indeed, the Relax powered bingo site Bingo.com was chosen by a panel of experts to win the Fair Play Which Bingo award 2016.
- During each bingo game in most of the rooms an analysis of the best performing (1TG) tickets held by other players is displayed, showing their name and which number or numbers they need for bingo
- A breakdown of prizes paid out is shown after the end of the game, including the total payout in £ sterling but also showing the amounts paid out in the currency actually used (e.g. kroner for Swedish players)
- It is extremely easy for players to see what they have to do to qualify for promotions. For example, the All Stars bingo room has a meter on it (visible from the lobby) showing precisely how much of the spend needed to gain entry has been completed. When Bingo.com ran a promotion which awarded a free scratchcard following £10 of play on bingo, players were notified almost immediately after they qualified.
- The loyalty scheme awards goodies via a spin of the Loyalty Wheel whenever the Loyalty Meter (which is prominently displayed in all bingo rooms) is filled.
- The bonusing system is different. Although only Unibet Bingo has a bingo bonus welcome offer (the others are slots focused), both sites have a bingo voucher system as part of the player loyalty scheme; a bingo voucher is essentially a bingo bonus with a 4 x wagering requirement but has one feature that makes it much better than any bingo bonuses you’ll find anywhere else. Basically, any bingo vouchers a player has will be used for bingo ticket purchases BEFORE anything else in the player’s account (the opposite of what happens at most other bingo sites where cash is used first). Once a bingo voucher starts to be used it has a 7 day expiry.
Relax also have a casino platform, Silver Bullet; it is an open gaming platform allowing slots from a number of lesser known providers to be featured.
We expect this great and relatively little known bingo product to continue to be a great choice throughout 2024.
