CasinoGrounds’ Co-Founder, Kim Hultman, and Relax Gaming’s Head of Games, Daniel Jonsson, sat down to discuss their latest collaboration, Book of Power - a highly volatile rewrite of the traditional Book of format we know and love.
Let’s set the scene - This is the fourth Relax and CasinoGrounds collaboration so far, how many people are involved in the process and how is production shared?
Kim: We’ve launched our fourth collaboration already! Time has flown and it’s been a journey packed with games we can both be proud of. From CasinoGrounds' side, we’ve seen the same core group involved since the very first collaboration in 2020. That includes me, Andreas Andersson, Tobias Svensen and Daniel Giuffra - who joined us right after Iron Bank was released.
In terms of roles, we generally come up with the theme and concept that we feel our community is craving and then take this to Relax to turn it into a killer game, add slick graphics, and bring it to life. This said, we’re a tight-knit team here at CG and everyone gets involved during feedback stages.
DJ: This was my third venture with CasinoGrounds for a collaboration game, my colleagues Zach Pisani and Callum Sultana managed the first hit - Iron Bank. As the Product Owner of Book of Power, my job was to fuse CasinoGrounds’ concepts with Relax’s signature adrenaline-pumping flavour, while our Math genius Ante Forsgren, was in charge of bringing the features to life and crafting an exhilarating experience.
All three games before Book of Power followed similar styles and mechanics, why the sudden change with Book of Power?
DJ: Funnily enough, Book of Power was on our radar even before Net Gains was in the pipeline. At the time, we were buzzing with ideas about cutting-edge mechanics that didn’t quite gel with a Book of framework, so we opted to shelve it and circle back when the opportunity presented itself. Given its status as the gaming world’s most popular genre, it was inevitable that we’d join forces to tackle this format.
Both ourselves and CasinoGrounds share a passion for high-volatility experiences, loaded with surprises and fresh takes on popular mechanics; so this Book of title has been a long time coming.
Kim: Exactly, whilst we were excited to bring a Book of title to market, the timing felt better for a third installment of our free-style slot games. We were brimming with new concepts and wanted a clean canvas to work with. Once that was out of our system we were excited to tackle a familiar template game and take it to the next level with Relax.
There’s an ocean of Book of games out there but they tend to lack excitement, so naturally, we wanted to create our own version, packed with our favourite fixed features like the Power Free Spins bonus.
Did the inspiration for the title come from the CasinoGrounds community of players?
Kim: Book of games are amongst the biggest iGaming formats worldwide, so to a certain extent I think there’s always a demand for a new breed of the style. It was time for a highly volatile version to hit the market and teaming up with Relax and its amazing team meant not only having creative insight, but experience; so they take could take our concepts to new levels. We’ve already received great feedback on the math and the graphics, so kudos to Daniel and Ante for doing the heavy lifting!
DJ: That’s great to hear, thank you! Echoing Kim, the market was ready for an exciting Book of rendition and Relax was up for the challenge. CasinoGrounds approached us with some really good ideas and then it was up to Ante and my team to engineer the mechanics, following that, we got stuck into fleshing out the immersive player experience.
The prototype took shape early on to test out the mechanics and the team immediately took to it. The whole process flowed effortlessly. CasinoGrounds and Relax worked as a tag team with one vision, and we couldn’t be happier with the result.
Lastly, who was Book of Power built for?
DJ: The players we’re hoping to attract with this game are Book of players who are looking to get something more out of the ordinary template. As with our other collaboration games, the CasinoGrounds community is always who we aspire to attract. These are thrill-seekers who can be experimental, look for high volatility, and know how to have a good time.
Kim: I agree, we’re aiming for players who are familiar with the type of game but find the current titles too soft. At the end of the day, we’re looking to build titles that we enjoy playing. LetsGiveItASpin streams for 200-300 hours a month so it’s vital that we love the content we’re using.
On that note, we have recurring giveaways on the games we co-created with Relax because they resonate so well with our audience, so check out the stream for fantastic Book of Power giveaways!
