Grand Junction: Golden Guns Slot by Playtech

The steam train does double duty here, and understanding that is most of the game. As the scatter it's the only way in: five Grand Junction trains landing anywhere at once set off the Grand Junction Feature. But the same train turns up again inside that feature, where its second job quietly decides whether you ever reach the jackpots.

Stage one is a hold and spin worth nine spins, and two symbols lock. Coins land carrying a cash value of 1x, 2x, 3x or 5x your total bet and stay stuck for the rest of the round. Trains land and stick too. A conductor doesn't lock in place, but each one that drops hands you three extra spins. When the spins run dry, every held coin gets added up and paid. Simple enough on its own.

The trains are the part to watch. Collect three or more across those nine spins and stage two opens, a separate bonus that awards one of four fixed jackpots. Fall short of three and you never see it, however well the coins landed. None of the jackpots climb: Mini and Minor sit at 20x and 100x, the Major at 500x, and the Grand at 2,000x total bet, which doubles as the ceiling for the whole game.

Between bonuses it's a straight 243-ways board, matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left with no fixed lines. The reels rest on a dusty main street, a red saloon on one side and a sheriff's office on the other, held in an ornate carved-wood surround under a warm sandy-gold sky. The frontier cast runs from a moustachioed gunslinger and a masked, purple-hatted bandit cowgirl, who pays the most of the picture symbols, down through a golden horse medallion, a red stagecoach, an iron safe and a golden revolver, with A-K-Q-J-10-9 royals underneath. Wild covers all of them but never the train, so it can't fake a trigger. No buy feature and no ante bet, so those five trains have to show up on their own.