5 Treasures Slot by Light & Wonder

The signature trick lives in the bonus. Land 3 or more Treasure Door scatters on adjacent reels from the left and you take a payout plus six free spins, but before the round starts a picker appears and asks you to commit to one of five modes. Each mode is named after one of the game's zodiac luck animals and stuffs the reels with a fixed count of that symbol for the entire round. Dragon mode loads 88 copies and pays the most per hit. Phoenix runs 98. Tiger 108. Turtle 118. Koi tops out at 128 copies, which means the smallest payouts but the most frequent ones. You are literally picking your variance before reel one spins, and that single decision changes the entire feel of the bonus.

Retrigger with another 3 Treasure Doors and you get six more spins using the same stuffed reel set you originally chose. So if Koi is paying steadily, you stay in Koi. If you opened with Dragon and one premium hit covered the whole session already, you might wish you had picked anything else.

Then there is the FU BAT jackpot, which is the second reason this game from Light & Wonder still has a following. FU BAT wilds land on reels 2, 3 and 4 only, substitute for everything in the base game (and for the Treasure Doors during free spins on left-to-right wins), and every bat that lands drops coins into a visible pot above the reels. The pot itself is purely cosmetic. The jackpot trigger is RNG. When it fires you get a screen of 12 coins and pick until you reveal three matching Fu Babies, awarding the MINI, MINOR, MAJOR or GRAND tier. Hit a Jackpot and Free Spins on the same spin and the Jackpot is paid out first.

The board sits inside a carved golden pagoda with dragon mascarons in the corners and a deep crimson backdrop. Reel symbols are standing golden idols of the five luck creatures on red satin panels, with the jackpot tier ribbon and four Fu Baby portraits running across the top. Top prize is a hard 250,000-coin cash ceiling.