Gold Hit & Link: Tiger Jones Slot by Playtech

Most coin-collect slots keep a tidy rectangle. This one doesn't. The reels climb in uneven steps, four rows tall on the left and stretching to seven on the right, and that shape swells further once a feature fires. Tiger Jones himself, a Bengal-tiger explorer in a brown fedora and leather jacket clutching a golden jaguar idol, sits as the top symbol. Below him you get a jade tiger idol, an explorer's fedora, a six-shooter revolver, an Aztec ring and jade-carved royals, all set against a sunlit jungle clearing of Mayan temple ruins, thick green foliage and a carved stone disc.

The base feature is the Gold Hit money-collect, part of Playtech's Gold Hit line. Land a coin and it locks for at least three spins. Cash Prize Coins pay a printed value. A Collect Coin sweeps up every prize sitting on its own reel. A Special Prize Coin hands over a Major, Minor or Mini. Fill a reel with coins and you take everything on it. This part will feel familiar if you've played the plainer Gold Hit titles, since Playtech reuses the engine a lot.

The Gold Link feature is where this one pulls ahead. Collecting a Gold Link Coin drops you into a hold-and-win respin on a padlocked grid, three respins, coins and blanks only. Every Gold Link Coin cracks a padlock and opens more of the grid, and each fresh coin resets the respins back to three. Coins that land on the higher rows get collected and multiplied by the value marked beside each row, so pushing the action upward is where the numbers grow. Unlock the ninth row at the very top and the Mega prize comes into range.

Four jackpots sit fixed, none of them progressive. Mega is the ceiling, reachable only through that top row of the Gold Link feature, while Major, Minor and Mini come off the Special Prize Coin. Bonus symbols run the Free Games, with three, four or five awarding 10, 12 or 15 rounds. Coins stay stuck for the whole round here. Fill a reel and a Wheel spins to multiply that reel's prizes by up to x5 or throw you into Gold Link, and the full haul pays at the end. An optional Feature Bet shortens the odds of reaching Gold Link if you want to force it.

Getting to that ninth-row Mega is a long grind though. You're cracking padlock after padlock on a grid that only keeps growing if the coins keep coming, and they don't always cooperate.