20 Stars Ablaze Slot by Playtech

This is the largest board in the Stars Ablaze family. The 9 and 15 came on smaller grids; here you get 20 cells, and that number carries weight because filling every one of them is how you take the Grand outright. There are no paylines. It's a pure coin-collect game, so every payout comes from gold medallion coins, each stamped with a cash value from 5 up to 25 times your total bet and marked with a laurel-wreathed star. What you win is simply the coins sitting on the grid added together.

Coins do nothing until the Hold & Respin fires, and it fires when the whole middle reel fills with them. After that, everything sticks. You start with three respins, and each fresh coin or symbol resets the counter back to three, so a steady trickle keeps the round breathing. It runs until the respins are gone or all 20 positions are packed, and it pays only at the end. Pack all 20 and the Grand lands on the spot.

The Golden Pot is the collector that turns a decent board into a heavy one. When it drops during the respins it sweeps up every coin on screen and multiplies the pile by up to x20, though it leaves the jackpots and Mystery tiles untouched. Those Mystery tiles come three ways. A plain Mystery flips into a coin, a prize or a Pot. A Mystery Star reveals one of the four fixed jackpots, Mini through Grand at 1,000x. And a Mystery Lock reveals a coin, prize or pot, then holds its spot until the Hold & Respin triggers, saved per bet and per volatility setting, so changing either wipes what you had stored.

Two dials sit to the left of the reels. A row of chilli peppers lets you set volatility to Low, Mid or High, trading how often the feature shows up against the size of an average win, which is a choice most slots make for you. Next to it, an Extra Bet at x2, x3 or x5 pushes feature frequency higher still. The look is hot and a little gaudy: a red-orange sky churning with smoke and sparks behind an ornate gold Greek-column cabinet, medallion coins glinting across a near-black grid. The ceiling is 2,074x.