Gold Pile: New Year's Gold Slot by Playtech

It's Chinese New Year on a street at night: a red temple, paper lanterns strung across the top of the reels and fireworks scattering sparks behind them. The reels sit in a gold border under three prize meters, with a coin tray perched above reel five. A golden ox, the zodiac and title symbol, tops the paytable, followed by a ribboned coin medallion, a red festival drum, a bundle of firecrackers, a cluster of gold coins and a golden scroll, with teal A-K-Q-J-10-9 royals underneath. Wins pay left to right across the 25 lines, and the wild covers everything except the scatter and any gold symbol.

The free games are what separate this one from the rest of the Gold Pile family. Three or more red New Year plaques land the scatter and award six spins with held wilds. Any wild that drops, normal or gold, sticks in place for the whole round, so the board slowly fills with locked positions the longer it runs. And a held wild sitting on reel five isn't fixed to one type: it flips between a normal wild and a gold wild from spin to spin, which matters because gold plus wild is a trigger. Three more scatters mid-round add another three spins on top.

Every symbol except the scatter has a gold version, and those only ever land on reel five. The Gold Meter dial down the left side lets you set how often that happens, a percentage you push up or down yourself. Crank it higher and reel five turns gold more often. It's a risk control you dial, not a paid buy, and it leaves the prize values alone. From there two things can fire. A five-of-a-kind that includes a gold reel-five symbol and a wild filling in pays the Gold Pile, the Mini at 40x if the winning symbol is a royal, the Maxi at 160x for anything else. But a five-of-a-kind with a gold reel-five symbol and no wild helping out kicks off the Grand Chase instead: three respins where only reel five turns, loaded with gold triggers and special Grand symbols. Land the Grand symbol in the highlight window and the Grand pays 4,000x, the top prize in the game. Miss it across all three respins and you settle for a Mini or Maxi. Both features can turn up during the free games too, held wilds and all.