Gold Hit & Link: JP Bacon & Co Slot by Playtech

JP Bacon is a portly pig in a top hat and monocle, a cash-stuffed briefcase in one trotter, and he runs his own pink neoclassical bank, complete with fluted columns, a teal tiled roof and a broad flight of steps under the reels. The reels themselves grow as they go right: four symbols tall on the first two, six on the middle pair, eight on the rightmost, for 4,608 ways paying left to right across consecutive reels. The Gold Hit mechanic runs the whole time. When a Cash Prize coin, Mystery Prize coin or Gold Link coin lands, it locks to its reel for at least three spins, with a little three-dot counter ticking down beneath it. Fill a full reel with coins and every prize sitting on it pays out. Cash coins show a value from 0.5x up to 10x the total bet; Mystery coins hand you one of four fixed jackpots.

Those jackpots are flat, not progressive: Mini at 20x, Minor at 50x, Major at 200x, and the top tier, MEGA, at 500x. A Feature Bet toggle sits on the left panel, labelled "Double Chance of Features". Switch it on and your stake rises by half again, buying better odds of reaching Free Games and Gold Link. It's an ante, not a bonus buy, and there's no way to purchase entry here. One quiet touch worth knowing: locked-coin progress is stored per bet level, so raising or dropping your stake parks whatever you've collected instead of wiping it.

Three, four or five Bonus symbols, which are JP Bacon's own portrait, award 10, 12 or 15 Free Games. Coins lock for the entire round rather than three spins, and filling a reel spins a wheel that either multiplies that reel's prizes by up to x5 or throws you straight into Gold Link. Gold Link coins can't drop during Free Games, so the wheel is your only way in from there.

Gold Link is the feature everything else feeds. Collect a Gold Link coin in the base game, or land the Free Games wheel on it, and the board opens out to a full 8x5 grid with padlocked rows. You get three respins, only coins and blanks land, and each coin that locks resets the count back to three. Fresh Gold Link coins pop padlocks and open new rows, and unlocking a row can stamp a multiplier of up to x10 on it or award one of the four jackpots outright. The very top end works out to around 2,822x the total bet.