Jewels of Ra Slot Review

Pragmatic Play is taking us back to ancient Egypt with Jewels of Ra, but beneath the familiar theme lies a pretty ruthless mechanic. At first glance, it looks like your standard hold-and-win slot, but the game builds its entire economy around a snag: the cash values you land in the bonus round don't mean a thing unless a specific "Collect" symbol shows up to grab them. It's a setup that can create great tension.

The game really revolves around its Respin feature. You trigger it by landing six Money symbols, or you can just buy straight in for a very reasonable 60x your base bet.

Once you're in, the regular symbols vanish, leaving a grid of blanks, Money symbols, and Collect symbols. You get three respins that reset every time a Money or Collect symbol lands. But the rule that defines the game is this: Money symbols don't pay out just by being on the screen. They just sit there until a Collect symbol lands to sweep up all the cash in view.

When a collection happens, it clears the board and bumps up a global multiplier (climbing from 1x up to 10x). Because the board clears, that bigger multiplier is always waiting for a fresh batch of symbols to land. The only exceptions are the fixed Minor (200x), Major (500x), and Mega (2500x) prizes, which ignore the multiplier entirely. (Also, if you manage to fill all 20 spots, the board auto-collects and bumps up the multiplier without needing a Collect symbol, which is a nice touch).

I bought the feature for 60x. On my third respin, a Collect symbol landed, sweeping up 10 symbols for a 22x payout. The board cleared, and my multiplier bumped up to 2x. Over the next 20 or so respins, I landed 11 more Money symbols, building up over 100x in visible value on the grid. The anticipation was great, but a second Collect symbol never showed up before my spins ran out. Those 11 symbols just vanished, and I walked away with about a third of my buy-in. It's a stark reminder of how this game works: seeing the money on the screen doesn't mean it's yours yet.

If you prefer to alter how you play the base game, Jewels of Ra offers two interesting side bets.

• The Ante Bet: For 3x your base bet, your chances of naturally triggering the bonus are multiplied by five.
• The Super Spin: For 20x your base bet, the game guarantees that two to five reels will synchronize on every single spin. It completely disables the Respin bonus. It's a cool option if you just want to chase big base-game wins instead of dealing with the collector mechanic.

If Jewels of Ra sounds a bit too harsh, or if you just want to see how it stacks up, it's worth looking at some alternatives.

Within Pragmatic's own lineup, Heartbreakers has a similar 5x4 cash-collect setup and the exact same 96.53% RTP. However, it's lower volatility, has a higher 10,000x max win, and banks your cash silently to pay it all at the end, saving you the heartbreak of leaving money on the board. Cheetah Wild is another low-volatility alternative with the same 5,000x max win, though its collection requires an unbroken chain of symbols starting from the first reel. If you want something even more explosive, Chests of Cai Shen Infinity, due in late October, uses a similar blank-and-coin grid but bumps the max win to 15,000x and uses colored coins to trigger modifiers without clearing the board.

The closest comparison to Jewels of Ra's strict "no collect, no cash" rule comes from PG Soft. Their game Alibaba's Cave of Fortune runs a very similar rule, where a board full of coins pays nothing without a collector pot, though that game offers double the max win at 10,000x.

Jewels of Ra is a fair game, but it's unapologetically volatile. The 60x bonus buy is cheap enough that the dead spins don't sting too badly, but you have to go in knowing that a screen full of cash is only an illusion until that Collect symbol finally drops.