Halloween Fortune Slot by Playtech

The three witches are the whole personality of this game. One in a scarlet dress, one in green, one in blue, each riding side-saddle on a broomstick across a full moon coloured to match her outfit. They also happen to be the three top-value regular symbols, ranked in that order: the red witch pays best, green next, blue behind her. So the prettiest reels are usually the ones stacked with red. Below them sit a green-eyed black cat, a raven perched on a bare branch, a candle-topped skull, a red potion in a round flask and a bronze pentagram amulet swinging on a chain.

The grinning orange Jack-O-Lantern is the wild, and it does double duty. It fills in for any of the paying symbols to complete lines, and it's the single highest-paying icon on the board in its own right, well clear of even the red witch. The Halloween Fortune logo works as the scatter, paying on its own from anywhere on the grid without needing to line up.

The bonus hangs on one fussy condition. You need the witch's-brew cauldron to land on reel one and reel five at the same time, both ends of the grid, nothing in between counting. Hit that and a two-stage round opens up, handing out free spins with win multipliers layered on top. It's the only real feature here, so a lot of the game's bigger sessions come down to how often those outer reels cooperate.

This is the first Halloween Fortune, the 2012 original that later spawned two sequels. It shows its age in a good way and a plain one. The art still holds up, all moonlit woods, twisted silhouetted trees and a lit witch's cottage tucked behind the reels. But the mechanics are simple by modern standards. No stacked wilds, no sticky pumpkins, no buy option, no jackpot ladder. Just the pumpkin wild, the logo scatter and that cauldron bonus. If you've played the flashier sequels first, the base game here will feel stripped back, which is exactly what it is. A clean, good-looking Halloween slot from before the studio started piling on the extras.