Lil' Demon: Mega Cash Collect Slot by Playtech

A little red demon with curved horns and a gold belt leans in from the side of the reels, grinning while lava bubbles through a cavern of jagged purple rock. Gold coins and loose diamonds pile up on the cave floor. The demon is the Wild, and he stands in for everything except the cash coins and the Cash Collect symbol.

The base game runs on a familiar loop. A Cash Collect symbol on reel 1 or reel 5, or both at once, sweeps up every coin on the board, and each coin carries its own set cash value printed right on it. Two collectors don't split the pot. They each grab the lot. Pair a Cash Collect with a Diamond and you win one of four fixed prizes at random: the Mini at 20x, the Minor at 50x, the Major at 200x, or the Grand at 500x. These aren't progressives, and they can drop again and again.

Here's the catch. That base game is about as standard as Cash Collect slots get, and almost everything worth playing for sits behind the free games. Getting there can be a slog.

The round starts when a Cash Collect gathers the blue "+N" coins, and your spin count is just their values added together. Extra reels open up, and the collector starts behaving differently. Now a Cash Collect can land anywhere on the grid, and once it lands it sticks for the next spin while sliding down one row at a time until it falls off the bottom edge. Land one next to a Key and it unlocks a lock on the extra reels from the bottom up. Clear the top lock and that collector freezes in place for the rest of the round.

Those extra reels are where the power-ups live. Arrow Up shoves every Cash Collect symbol up a row on the next spin. Dropping Wilds pours a stack of the demon down a reel, and if a Wild is already sitting there it adds a multiplier of up to x3. Sticky Cash opens at 1x your bet and doubles every spin it gets collected, and once it climbs past 16x it turns into a Diamond, so it can start feeding those fixed prizes. Random Coin freezes for three spins and rerolls into a different symbol each time.

The demon himself gets in on it too. On any spin he might drop stacks of Wilds, toss in an extra Cash Collect or a coin, or boost the values already sitting on the reels.