Introduction

The Skywind Group is an Isle of Man based online casino game developer. Founded in 2012, the company has established a worldwide presence, having built offices in Belarus, Latvia, Cyprus, the Ukraine, and Australia.

Skywind provides their customers with gaming platforms, backend systems, and a library of games that the studio has developed themselves. These games number more than 50, and are entirely of the video slot variety. Many of these games are developed with Asian markets in mind, but there are other games with more widespread appeal as well.

Skywind certainly has a good base for their operations, and moving forward it’ll be interesting to see how they mature as a brand. The Asia focus certainly will help it in the future as the market continues to grow.

Arcade Games

The corporate web site indicates four different arcade games, but I found only one of them on a "play for free" site, Fu Fish. I must say, it was very well done and unique as far as I know. The object was pretty simple, to shoot fish. Every bullet fired was a bet. It didn't seem to make any difference where you aimed, sometimes you hit a fish and sometimes you didn't. Different fish won different amounts. I suspect there is no actual skill component as the help screen kindly told you the return to player was 97.00%.

3 Card Brag

3 Card Brag is nearly the same thing as Three Card Poker. Just some minor changes to the hand order. They follow the liberal 1-4-5 Ante pay table and 1-4-6-30-40 Pair Bonus pay table. This results in a house edge of 2.14% on the Pair Bonus and 3.35% on the Ante.

Blackjack

The blackjack game was nicely done. The rules are pretty liberal, as follows:

• Six decks
• Dealer stands on soft 17
• Blackjack pays 3 to 2
• Dealer does not peek for blackjack. Player loses only original bet if the dealer gets blackjack with a 10 up, but loses the entire amount bet if the dealer gets blackjack with an ace up.
• Double after split allowed.
• Split once only (no re-splitting)
• A ten-card non-busted hand (known as a 10-card Charlie) is an automatic winner. This is approximately a one in a million event.
• No surrender
• No drawing to split aces

As correctly stated in the help files, the house edge under these rules, assuming correct basic strategy, is 0.45%. The basic strategy is below.

Slot machines

Skywind has the best selection of Asian-themed slots I have ever seen. I'm not just talking about your usual games with dragon, panda, or kung fu themes but games with names in Chinese. I've been saying for many years the first person to think of this idea, well second behind me, would do very well with the huge Asian market. Roughly half their games are some kind of Asian theme and half of those are in Chinese.

The games themselves are quite well done in both artwork and graphics. The game designs were mostly standard for the business. Some of the games had a "money shot" symbol, but it evidently didn't mean what I thought.

External Links

• Skywind Group - Official web site