Gold Rush: Cash Collect Slot by Playtech

This one carries the Discovery Channel licence, so the setting is the real Klondike: the reels sit in a riveted-steel headframe against misty, forested mountains, and below the board excavators and dozers churn through mounds of dirt while four jewelled jackpot bars glow across the top. The bearded prospectors from the TV show fill the top of the paytable, with a gold pan, a diamond and loose nuggets under them and A-K-Q-J royals at the bottom.

The Pay Dirt feature is the piece that leans hardest on the theme. At random, once a spin is already turning, a mining machine trundles onto the screen and dumps a load of extra symbols across the reels: cash coins, blue Free Games coins, a Prize, a Cash Collect, or whole stacks of Wilds. It's the base game's main jolt, because the rest is standard Cash Collect plumbing. The WILD GOLD symbol, a stamped gold bar, arrives in stacks and covers everything except the coins and the collector. Gold cash coins each carry a value from 1x up to 25x the total bet, and a blue-and-gold Cash Collect landing on reel 5 sweeps every coin, Prize and +N coin sitting on the board into one payout.

Those +N coins are the Free Games trigger, and that round runs the Moving Cash Collect. Any Cash Collect that lands sticks around and slides one row down the reels every spin, banking whatever it touches, until it drops off the bottom edge and is gone. The wrinkle is the Arrow. When it lands it grabs every Cash Collect on screen and throws them all back up to the top row, so each one gets a fresh full run down through the coins again. That's the difference between a quiet round and a long one.

The jackpots work off the same collector. Land a Prize coin together with a Cash Collect and you're handed one of four fixed amounts at random: Mini 20x, Minor 50x, Major 200x or Grand 500x total bet, none of them progressive and all repeatable. No buy button and no ante here, so the machine and the +N coins are your only ways in. The ceiling is modest for the genre, around 1,000x, which tells you this is a coin-grind game rather than a one-spin-fortune one.