Forest Prince Slot by Playtech

The symbols don't sit in squares here. They sit in hexagons, packed together like a honeycomb across six columns and four rows, which is a strange look for a woodland nature slot and the first thing you'll notice before a single reel turns. Behind the honeycomb runs a golden autumn forest at low sun, amber-leaved trees and ferns and moss with a thread of stream, and the fifty paylines read across those hexagonal cells rather than a normal boxy grid.

The stag is the whole reason to play. He's a purple scatter, not a paying symbol, and he does two separate jobs depending on where you are in the game. In the base round he triggers the Big Bucks Free Games. Once you're inside them, every stag scatter that lands stops being a scatter and turns into a locked wild, pinned to its cell for the rest of the round. So the free games slowly fill with sticky substitutes, one stag at a time, and since the round retriggers with no cap, a hot streak can keep pouring stags onto a board that's already stacked with held wilds. The base reels rarely hand you much; the free games do the heavy lifting.

Getting in is helped along by the Stampede. On any ordinary spin a herd of deer can charge across the reels and drop extra scatters that weren't there, nudging you toward the trigger you might otherwise miss. The base game also carries an ordinary wild plus a sticky version of it, so wilds can hold in place outside the feature too, though on a far smaller scale.

The animal symbols are properly painted British wildlife, a red fox, a grey badger, a horned owl, a blue-and-orange kingfisher, a pine marten and a green frog, sat above jewelled card suits in green, red, yellow and gold. It's an older Playtech build from its ASH studio, so there's no buy button and no jackpot. Everything routes through the stag and how many of him you can lock down.