Relax Gaming and the Wild Franchise That Refused to Slow Down

In the English online casino scene, few slot series have managed to build a reputation as stubborn, loud, and durable as Money Train. These games did not become famous because of a soft theme or easy rhythm. They became famous because each new part turned the bonus round into the real main event and pushed the idea further than the last one. The series started as a rough Wild West machine and then kept mutating, first into a darker steampunk ride, then into a harsh futuristic experiment, and finally into a last chapter that felt almost overloaded on purpose. That constant escalation is exactly what made the brand so interesting in England, where slot audiences tend to remember mechanics that create their own internal drama instead of just repainting old rules.

Relax Gaming Built the Track Before It Built the Hype

Relax Gaming was founded in 2010 by Patrik Österåker and Jani Tekoniemi, and the early goal was not only to produce slots but to become a technical supplier with its own way of building and distributing games. Over time the company opened and expanded offices in Tallinn, Malta, Malmö, Belgrade, Gibraltar, Stockholm, and Novi Sad, launched casino, poker, and bingo products, rolled out the Silver Bullet partner program, and later pushed further with products such as Dream Drop. By its fifteenth anniversary, the business described itself as a group of more than 300 employees. That background matters because Money Train at https://royalen.org.uk/ did not come from a studio chasing one lucky hit. It came from a company that likes system design, modular mechanics, and features that can be stacked, revived, upgraded, and redistributed inside a round.

That broader developer style can be seen across many Relax titles, but the sharpest signature is easy to spot in Money Train. The studio likes math models with heavy volatility, mechanics that do more than one job, and bonus symbols that interact with each other instead of acting alone. It also has a habit of treating sequels as real upgrades rather than cosmetic copies. In England, where slot players and affiliates tend to follow return potential and feature identity very closely, that approach gave Relax a long runway. The official product pages for later entries even list alternative UK game IDs for Money Train 3 and Money Train 4, which shows that the franchise was not a side export but part of the regulated conversation around British facing releases.

Money Train Began as a Western Hold Up With a Heavy Bonus Core

The original Money Train arrived in 2019, with third party reviews placing the release on 7 August 2019. It used a 5 by 4 layout with 40 fixed paylines and high volatility, and the official maximum win was set at 20,000 times the stake. The storyline was straight Wild West pulp. A gang of outlaws chased the train, the reels were packed with bandit figures and card ranks, and the whole machine revolved around breaking into the Money Cart Bonus Round. That early game already showed what the series would become. The base game did its job, but the real identity sat inside a separate bonus field where values could collect, expand, and compound.

The original bonus round was simple by later series standards, though simple is relative here. It began when bonus symbols appeared on reels one, three, and five. The game then moved into a special cart with 20 symbol positions and three respins. Every new symbol reset the counter back to three. Money Safe symbols revealed values. Payer symbols added their value to other visible symbols. Collector symbols swept visible values into themselves. Persistent versions repeated their behavior on later spins, and the Widener could open an extra reel to create more room for value symbols. That design was clever because it taught the core language of the franchise early. The round was not about matching lines. It was about building a machine inside the machine, one where every new piece could change the value of the pieces already on screen.

Money Train 2 Turned a Hit Into an Industry Problem

Money Train 2 launched on 2 September 2020 and quickly became the part of the series that changed everything. Relax Gaming presented it as one of its biggest releases of the year, and that was not empty noise. The sequel moved away from the cleaner western feel into a post apocalyptic steampunk world, raised the top win to 50,000 times the stake, and pushed the volatility even harder. The reel setup stayed at 5 by 4 with 40 paylines, but the whole game felt more vicious because the base game finally got extra bite through respins and the bonus round gained more moving parts.

Its bonus structure is the point where the franchise became a benchmark. Three or more bonus symbols trigger the Money Cart Bonus, while two bonus symbols can start a respin feature in the base game. Inside the cart, the round starts with three respins and keeps resetting as long as new symbols land. Collector, Payer, Sniper, and Necromancer became the famous names here. Collector gathers values from the board into itself. Payer adds its own value to other symbols. Sniper doubles multiple target symbols. Necromancer revives spent non persistent symbols so their effect can fire again.

Two extra reels can unlock if columns fill, which increases space and pressure at the same time. A concrete bonus example shows the logic well. If the board already holds three value symbols at 2x, 3x, and 5x, a Payer landing with 4x can raise those to 6x, 7x, and 9x. If a Sniper then doubles two of them, the numbers jump again. When a Collector lands after that, it sweeps the inflated field into its own value, and suddenly a round that looked ordinary a moment earlier becomes serious money. This is why Money Train 2 still gets treated as the franchise entry that turned feature interaction into a spectacle of its own.

Money Train 3 Took the Formula Into the Future and Doubled the Madness

Money Train 3 arrived in September 2022, with Relax Gaming calling it one of the most anticipated releases of the year. By this point the western bones of the series were still visible, but the setting had shifted into a steampunk and post apocalyptic future. The max win climbed to 100,000 times the stake, the volatility stayed brutally high, and the familiar 5 by 4 frame with 40 fixed lines remained in place. The main story now felt like a gang of upgraded survivors riding through a harsher world where every character had become less human and more like a weaponized mechanic.

The bonus game became wider, stranger, and far more ambitious. The classic Collector, Sniper, Necromancer, and Collector Payer returned, but now the series added features like the Persistent Shapeshifter, which changes into a different special symbol on every spin, the Absorber, which soaks up normal bonus symbols and adds their multipliers to itself, and Tommy Gun variants, which repeatedly target one symbol type and keep piling value onto it. Even the base game got a respin feature on non winning spins, where a symbol becomes sticky and can grow with multipliers if more copies appear. The important thing is not the number of features alone. It is the way they overlap. A persistent feature can keep working every spin, a Necromancer can bring dead symbols back, a Shapeshifter can become exactly the kind of effect the board needs, and the whole round can snowball into the six figure ceiling. In terms of pure escalation, this is the part where Money Train stopped being just a franchise and became a full scale volatility statement.