Avatars: Gateway Guardians Slot by Yggdrasil Gaming

The wheel is the whole game here, and once you watch it spin a few times the design clicks. Six pie sections sit on a carved stone disc, and inside each section three concentric rings, inner, middle and outer, spin independently. A win only lands when all three rings of one section show parts of the same guardian, head on top, torso in the middle, legs on the outside. Seven spirit-guardian symbols carry the paytable, each one a hand-painted Pandora-style figure in glowing purples, greens and oranges that match the bioluminescent jungle behind the wheel.

The Hot Spot is what gives the base game its teeth. One section glows white at the top of the disc, and any complete win that forms inside it activates a multiplier ladder that draws from x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x10 or x20 per spin, weighted at random. The ladder keeps stacking on each new Hot Spot win until either five stacks land or the total hits the x101 ceiling. A small "hand" symbol can also appear to stop the run and pay out whatever has accumulated. So a quiet spin and a hand-cap spin look almost identical until the math resolves, which is part of why this plays high volatility despite the friendly 96.3 figure.

The bonus uses the same wheel but expands it to eight pie sections, and that extra real estate matters. Free Spins trigger when three parts of the FS symbol land anywhere on the grid, no alignment required, and you get ten spins with no retrigger. The number of Hot Spots inside the bonus is set at the moment of the trigger by how many FS parts happened to land inside the base Hot Spot, zero through three FS parts gives you 2, 4, 6 or 8 Hot Spots respectively. Land all three FS parts inside the glowing section and every section in the bonus becomes a Hot Spot.

No buy bonus, no ante, no jackpot, no retrigger. The whole machine is the wheel and the multiplier ladder, which is unusual for a 2020 release and still feels distinct against most fantasy slots from the same era. If the circular layout pulls you in, Yggdrasil's wider catalog has a few other oddly-shaped grids worth a look.