Lunar Link: Nile Moon Slot by Playtech

Trigger the Lunar Link round and the board physically grows. The five-reel frame you start on rearranges into a stepped tower, three symbols tall on the left and climbing to six on the right, so the number of spots the moon orbs can fill jumps mid-feature. Six or more Moons set it off (five if you've switched on the Feature Bet), each caught Moon locks in place, and you get three respins that reset back to full every time a fresh one lands.

Filling happens column by column. Complete a whole column of the grown reel and it hands you a Special Wheel Spin, which pays a cash amount between 5x and 50x, one of the fixed jackpots, or a column multiplier of x2, x3 or x5 that then applies to everything stacked in that reel. Fill the fifth column and a sixth Grand reel opens up, the only route to the progressive Grand Jackpot sitting above the Major at 500x, Minor at 100x and Mini at 20x. Blue Moon orbs are the ones carrying printed cash, anywhere from 1x up to 50x the bet. Gold Moons do something else entirely.

Any single Gold Moon spins its own wheel before the respins settle, and that wheel pays cash, drops a jackpot, throws you into the free games, or starts the whole Hold & Respin round on its own. The Cleopatra Wild is the base-game standout, an expanding Wild that stretches to swallow an entire reel when it lands.

Free Games run off the star Scatter. Three of them buys six spins, and on every spin two neighbouring reels get bracketed together as clones, copying each other's symbols so a good match doubles up across both. More Scatters during the round add more spins.

The dressing is deep purple and midnight blue, a temple flanked by black Anubis jackals with a golden cobra coiled across the top and a moon orb glowing in the middle. Carved-stone royals, a green Eye of Horus, a golden ankh and a jewelled cobra fill the reels. It's handsome, but Egyptian slots are a crowded shelf, and the art doesn't do much its neighbours haven't. The bigger asterisk is the Feature Bet: it lifts your stake to make the Moon trigger hit more often, which is fine until you notice you're paying extra for odds the base game already gives you at a lower price.