Wheel O’Gold: Slot Overview
The latest leprechaun-themed slot game, Wheel O’Gold by Pragmatic Play, makes its way through the digital hills, bringing with it a landscape filled with sprawling meadows, an overarching rainbow, and symbols like four-leaf clovers and horseshoes. This game is Pragmatic Play’s recent endeavor to enchant players with scatter-paying mechanics, a feature that both the studio and the wider online gambling industry have grown particularly fond of lately. While one might be quick to label Wheel O’Gold as a mere clone of Gates of Olympus, adorned in a leprechaun’s top hat and buckled shoes, the game distinguishes itself through a unique approach to accumulating multipliers.
Upon loading Wheel O’Gold, players are welcomed by a quintessentially classic and charmingly generic leprechaun game aesthetic. Clovers decorate the screen’s lower edge, gradually giving way to vivid green fields, mountainous landscapes, and a sky graced by a rainbow. A leprechaun character, complete with a wide grin and a bushy beard, dances beside the gaming grid, nodding to the visual style established by Gates of Olympus. Wheel O’Gold firmly establishes itself within the leprechaun game genre, leaving little else to be said about its thematic direction.
Wheel O’Gold distinguishes itself as a slot game with high volatility, scoring a 5 out of 5 on the volatility scale, and offers several RTP (Return to Player) settings, with the highest being 96.02%. This RTP is achievable with bets ranging from 20 cents to $/€240 per spin under normal conditions and when utilizing the ante bet feature. Activating the ante bet increases the presence of scatter symbols on the reels at an additional cost of 25%, enhancing players’ chances to win.
The game unfolds on a 6-reel, 5-row grid, encased within a golden patterned frame, and employs a scatter-paying mechanism for generating wins. Wins are formed not by traditional paylines or ways but when a minimum of 8 identical symbols land anywhere on the grid, creating a scatter win. After such a win, the symbols involved explode and vanish from the reels, creating space for new symbols to fall into place and potentially form new winning combinations. This tumbling sequence continues until no further scatter wins occur after a tumble.
In terms of symbols, Wheel O’Gold features low-paying blue, purple, pink, and red gems, and high-paying symbols like a gold clover, a pipe, a mug of beer, a horseshoe, and a top hat. The payouts for landing 8-9 matching symbols range from 0.2 to 4 times the bet, whereas landing 12 or more symbols of a kind can pay out from 1 to 25 times the bet. Notably, Wheel O’Gold does not include wild symbols in its gameplay.
Wheel O’Gold: Slot Features
While Wheel O’Gold shares common features like tumbles, multipliers, free spins, and bonus buys with many of Pragmatic Play’s scatter-paying slots, the unique aspects lie in the introduction and amplification of multipliers.
Multiplier Feature: During the base game, achieving 5 consecutive tumbles within the same spin triggers the appearance of a multiplier wheel after the fifth tumble. This wheel, adorned with multipliers ranging from x2 to x50, randomly selects a multiplier to apply to all subsequent wins from that spin.
Free Spins: Landing 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols during the base game rewards players with 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. The initiation of the free spins round brings forth the multiplier wheel, assigning a random multiplier that applies to all wins throughout the free spins session. Each scatter symbol that appears during these rounds is collected, and for every 4 scatter symbols gathered, an additional 4 free spins are awarded. Moreover, each time the scatter threshold is reached, the wheel spins again, and its newly determined multiplier adds to the current multiplier for the duration of the free spins.
Buy Free Spins: For those eager to directly access the free spins round, the option to purchase this feature for 100 times the total bet is available from the base game. Opting for this purchase randomly generates 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols to activate the free spins, albeit at a slightly lower RTP of 95.94%.
Wheel O’Gold: Slot Verdict
One can’t help but ponder if there’s a dedicated corner within Pragmatic Play’s headquarters exclusively focusing on devising new scatter-paying slots. It’s as if the creative minds behind Gates of Olympus, having hit a home run, were assigned the eternal task of innovating new methods to blend scatter wins with multipliers. Wheel O’Gold, while sharing a lineage, introduces a twist to this formula. Unlike Gates of Olympus, where multiplier symbols descend onto the board, Wheel O’Gold hinges on accumulating consecutive tumble wins or free spin scatter symbols to trigger its multiplier wheel. This raises the question: is this approach better or worse? The answer isn’t straightforward. Both methods offer unique experiences, providing players with more variety, whether they sought it or not.
An intriguing aspect of Wheel O’Gold is the comparatively modest multiplier values on its wheel, peaking at x50, unlike the loftier x500 multipliers often seen in Gates of Olympus-style games. Despite the initial impression of less grandeur, Wheel O’Gold compensates with a winning potential capped at 10,000x the bet, doubling the possibilities in Gates of Olympus. This potential for significant wins underscores Wheel O’Gold’s capacity to deliver substantial rewards, matching the prowess of any other scatter-paying slot by Pragmatic Play.
Moreover, Wheel O’Gold offers a simplified multiplier mechanism that might appeal to fans of scatter-paying slots. Free spins begin with a multiplier that applies to all subsequent wins, eliminating the need for simultaneous multiplier and win symbol landings. This technical nuance presents a fresh angle for aficionados to explore, though the conventional theme might slightly mute the sense of novelty.