Avalon Gold Slot Review

ELK Studios brought back their resident explorer for Avalon Gold in late 2022, this time dropping him into an Arthurian legend theme. If you know ELK's "Gold" series, the explorer and the 6x4 ways start will feel familiar, but they've bolted a fun new coin-collect feature onto it that really changes the dynamic.

The main attraction here is the free spins round, triggered by landing three or more Bonus symbols. You start on a four-row grid, and every free drop that lands at least one winning cascade (or "avalanche") lifts the starting height by one row for the rest of the bonus. ELK calls this the "safety level," and it can climb all the way to eight rows with over 260,000 ways to win.

Then there are the Mystery Boxes. In the bonus they stick around from drop to drop, and once five or more are in view they open up at the end of your cascades. They can reveal cash coins, multipliers, a modifier that upgrades coin values, or a "Collect" symbol that gathers all the cash on the board and reactivates the boxes to pay out again.

As in ELK's Cygnus 2, you can buy straight into the action using the X-iter menu. The standard bonus costs 100x your bet, while the Super Bonus is a hefty 500x. (The Super Bonus makes the Mystery Boxes "persistent," meaning once they land, they stay on the board and keep triggering for the whole round). There are also a few cheaper options to buy single spins with guaranteed modifiers.

Playing the bonuses really highlights the game's brutal volatility. The safety level only climbs if you get wins. During my standard 100x bonus buy, I hit a dead run: the board stayed stuck at four rows, and I walked away getting back only about 60% of what I paid.

The 500x Super Bonus was a completely different story. I hit enough wins to max out the board at eight rows. On one of the final drops, a basic winning combo cleared the way for a block of persistent boxes to open twice, paying back about 90% of the massive buy-in on a single spin. It becomes pretty clear that the regular symbols matter as much for growing the grid as for what they pay, and the Mystery Boxes are where the bonus waits to cash in.

If you're a fan of older games in the series like Ecuador Gold or Tahiti Gold, Avalon Gold is an interesting pivot. ELK lowered the RTP (Return to Player) from a generous 96.1% in the older games down to a noticeable 94.0%. That's definitely a bummer, but they traded it for a big jump in potential: the max win went from 2,500x in Ecuador Gold and 5,000x in Tahiti Gold up to a staggering 25,000x.

It shares the exact same expanding board as Tahiti Gold, but the Mystery Boxes make it unique. None of the other Gold games in our catalogue is listed with Mystery Boxes or a cash collect. It reminds me a bit of ELK's Cygnus 2 (which uses sliding multiplier coins instead of boxes) or Hacksaw Gaming's Le Darkchaun, which has a similar coin-collecting vibe.

Avalon Gold doesn't feel like a traditional sequel. Instead, it feels like ELK took a familiar, well-loved grid and dropped a brand-new engine inside it. The lower RTP might turn some players off, and the base game can be painfully quiet, but the massive potential and the thrill of the Mystery Boxes make it a solid choice if you're a fan of high-risk, high-reward slots.