Book of the Priestess Bonus Buy Slot Review

An Aztec temple, a green-glowing spellbook, and ten paylines that stay quiet until the book turns up. That is Book of the Priestess Bonus Buy, and the whole reason it exists as its own release is the gold plaque bolted to the left of the reels.

Evoplay put out the original a month earlier with no buy button. This edition adds one at 87x the total bet, which hands you the same 10 free spins three Scatters would have triggered, and pushes the return on those bought spins to 96.00% against the 95.96% you get spinning normally. Four hundredths of a percent. Nobody is buying for that.

The rest carries straight over from the base title: 5x3 grid, 10 fixed lines, medium-high volatility, a 35% hit rate, stakes from 0.10 to 75, and a ceiling of 6,088x.

The reels sit inside a carved temple facade, ochre-gold blocks framing a black cracked-stone window, with a Mesoamerican fret pattern running along the plinth beneath the grid. Behind it, jungle. Flat cartoon greenery, a step pyramid catching sun in the distance, pale blue sky above the roofline. Bright rather than dusty, which is not the usual call for an Aztec slot.

The four priestesses are the best art here: one in a turquoise feathered headdress, one behind a red jaguar mask with a leaf crown, a red-haired one with a feather braided into her hair, and a blonde with a gold circlet and palm fronds at her shoulders. Card ranks are stone tiles with coloured inlay, blue Q, purple K, green 10, red A, and they read cleanly without pretending to be more than filler. The book is a red leather tome with a green gem set into the cover, trailing green fire every time it lands.

The base game is a waiting room. A 35% hit rate sounds generous until you notice most of what lands is a card rank paying half a stake or two and a half, and only the top priestess pays anything at all from two symbols, so the balance drips down in a way that is hard to feel good about. Ten lines on a 5x3 grid gives the reels very little to do between books.

Buying skips that, and the trade is that you find out almost immediately whether the round was worth the price. The symbol gets drawn, and you either sit up or you do not. It is a strange kind of tension, front-loaded, decided before a reel moves (and then the mask counter quietly gives you a route back, because two Scatters early on a bad draw makes the round live again).

Ten spins is short. Without the counter cycling at least once, a bought bonus is usually over before it has built any rhythm at all.

Nothing here is new, and Evoplay is not pretending otherwise. What lifts it above the pile of Aztec books is the mask counter, which earns its keep: a round that opens with a card rank pinned above the reels can still turn into something once the counter empties and hands over a second symbol plus five more spins. Most books in this genre give you one symbol and ten spins and that is your lot.

The buy is where it gets harder to defend. 87x is a full-price ticket for a bonus you cannot shape in any way, and the return bump on bought spins is small enough to be a rounding note rather than an argument. For my money the honest reading is that the base game is too thin to sit through, the button exists because Evoplay knows it, and the price reflects exactly how badly you want to stop spinning it.