Mighty Hat: Lamp of Gold Slot by Playtech

Keep your eyes on the middle reel. That's the only place the special lamp ever lands, and when it drops it hands you one of four features at random, so reel 3 is the thing to watch on every spin. The regular lamp wild fills in for any picture symbol except the palace scatter and the magic stone. But the special lamp on reel 3 is the trigger for everything worth chasing.

The four outcomes are far from equal. A Respin holds some reels in place and gives you a single spin back, with every ways-win during it carrying a multiplier. A Treasure Chest opens with up to five prizes inside, and those can be cash, a jackpot, free games, or the Mighty Hat feature itself. The Free Games round retriggers when more scatters land. And the Mighty Hat feature runs nine automatic spins where magic stones build borders around the reels, empty to silver to gold to red, every border held for the round. It's a hold-and-win climb, and the special lamp that started it locks in as a gold border to get you going.

Four fixed jackpots line the top: Mini at 20x, Minor at 50x, Major at 500x and the Grand at 1,000x your bet, which doubles as the game's ceiling. They arrive through the Treasure Chest or the cash mechanic rather than by lining up on the reels. No buy button and no ante bet, so that special lamp on the middle reel is your only way in.

The board is a palace at dusk. The 243-ways reels sit in a carved gold-and-red surround between onion-domed minaret towers, four jackpot bars glowing overhead and a smiling purple genie-hat mascot peeking up from the bottom-left. A blue-haired genie princess tops the paytable, above a grinning Aladdin, a friendly tiger poking through a green leaf, a sapphire ring and a rolled magic carpet, with ornate A-K-Q-J-10-9 royals in red, gold and blue below. Warm gold, sunset orange and jewel blue throughout, an Arabian Nights setting that leans storybook rather than lavish.