Gold Pile: Orangutan! Slot by Playtech

Start with the dial on the left, the Gold Meter, because it shapes how you play more than anything else on the board. Every symbol except the scatter has a golden twin, and those golden versions only ever land on reel 5. You set the Meter to a percentage yourself, and the higher you push it, the more often reel 5 fishes up a gold symbol. It doesn't touch the prize values and it isn't a paid buy, just a risk knob you turn. Crank it and you chase the gold features harder; ease off and you spin closer to a plain jungle line game.

Landing gold is only step one. When a five-of-a-kind line win includes a golden reel-5 symbol and at least one wild filling the gap, it pays the Gold Pile: the Mini if the winning symbol is a royal, the Maxi for anything else. Get that same golden five-of-a-kind with no wild propping it up, and instead you trigger the Grand Chase. Now only reel 5 spins, three times, loaded with gold triggers and special Grand symbols. Land the Grand symbol in the highlight window and it's yours; miss across all three respins and you take a Mini or Maxi. The three prizes are fixed at 25x, 75x and 2,500x the bet, and that Grand is the whole game's ceiling.

Three or more of the blue crystal scatters award eight free games, and this is where the gold really flows. Every free spin drops two extra wilds at random across reels 1 to 4, so both the Gold Pile and the Grand Chase fire far more readily than they do in the base game. Two scatters mid-round retrigger four more spins; three or more add eight.

The setting is a moonlit rainforest, giant dripping leaves and hanging vines lit blue, the reels held in a gold bamboo surround beneath three prize meters with a little gold-bar tray perched above reel 5. The cast runs from the burly orange orangutan up top down through a pink elephant, a black-and-gold sun bear, a clouded leopard, a purple pangolin and a hornbill, over gold-outlined royals. The wild covers every animal and royal but never the scatter or the gold symbols, which keeps those reel-5 golds doing their own separate job.