Imperial Relics: Three Pots Slot Review

Three golden pots sit on the palace roof above the reels, and the colour of the one you fill decides what the bonus round does. That is the whole idea behind Imperial Relics: Three Pots. Purple hands you a Collector, red splits the board into two grids, green adds a spin, and landing a mix of colours stacks the boosters together for one round.

Everything around that is conventional. Five reels, three rows, 20 fixed lines paying left to right, and a wild that only turns up from reel two onward. RTP is 96.31% with a 16.31% hit rate, so about one spin in six returns anything and plenty of those are card royals handing back half a stake. The hold and win round is the game. The base game is the wait for it.

Two buy buttons sit behind the Bonus Buy panel, at 67x and 121x. The cheap one is the better deal, and not by a small margin.

Evoplay set this against a Chinese palace at dusk, teal glazed roof tiles layered back into a pale peach sky, and it looks good. The reel panel is deep oxblood inside a red lacquer frame, with the three pots perched on the ridge above it, lids ajar, gold ingots spilling over the rims and each one banded with its booster name. Down the left rail the jackpot plaques stack in descending size, EPIC in gold, SUPER in red, MEGA in purple, MINI in green.

The premium symbols are the strongest part of the art. An emperor with a black beard and a small jade crown in gold-embroidered robes, a green dragon coiled on a gold plinth, a treasure junk under full sail on a blue tile, a gold lion guardian mid-snarl on green, and a blue and white porcelain vase on magenta. The wild is a half-unrolled scroll showing a mountain landscape, framed in violet, and it stacks. Bonus symbols are round coin medallions with the value stamped through the middle and a ring in whichever pot colour they belong to.

Then half the symbol set is A, K, Q, J and 10, drawn as fat red glyphs sitting flat on a red panel with no tile behind them. On a lot of spins the board is just red on red with one picture symbol floating in it, which undercuts how nicely the rest is dressed.

Quiet, mostly. At a 16.31% hit rate the base game goes long stretches doing nothing, and the wins that do arrive are usually royals clipping back a fraction of the stake, so the balance drifts down in a fairly straight line between features. There is no ante bet, no near-miss build, no counter filling up. Bonus symbols simply appear or they don't.

The round itself is short and sharp, and that is where the shape of the game sits. Three spins is barely anything, and the reset only holds while gold keeps landing, so a lot of rounds are over in five or six spins with a scattering of small values and a total that barely covers the trigger. What changes the arithmetic is density. The Collector converts a messy half-full field into a single number, which means a middling board can pay like a good one, and that makes it the booster you actually feel arriving. Double Game looks the most dramatic because there is suddenly twice as much board, but it spreads the same value across more surface rather than lifting it, and you'll likely finish plenty of two-field rounds under what a tight single field would have paid. Extra Spin is one more spin, which is exactly as interesting as it sounds.

Where the tension sits is that reset counter. Watching it drop to one with eleven positions open is the honest experience of this game, and the swing between that and a field that keeps refusing to stop is what the medium-high label is describing.

A well-made Asian hold and win with one idea that earns its place. Colour-coding the trigger so it also picks your booster is a clean piece of design, and the Collector is strong enough to carry the round on its own. The art holds up, the pots on the roof are a nice touch, and the seven booster combinations give the bonus more variety than most three-spin respin games manage.

The rest is familiar to the point of being anonymous. The base game does nothing but wait, the royals dominate the reels, and the palace setting brings nothing you have not seen. For my money the thing to actually take away is the buy menu: 67x returns 96.54% and 121x returns 95.79%, so the expensive button is the worse bet and no casino lobby will ever tell you that. Play it for the Collector, skip the premium buy.