Mighty Hat: Mystic Tales Slot by Playtech

A sun-dappled woodland opens the Mighty Hat series, and this is where it all started, the first slot to carry the name. The reels rest on a deep-blue glassy board wrapped in green ivy, with Grand, Major, Minor and Mini prize plaques strung across the top and a grinning blue wizard's-hat mascot peeking up from the bottom-left corner. The cast is pure fairytale forest: a flower-crowned fairy, a red-hatted gnome puffing a pipe, a green snail, a jewelled spellbook, red-and-blue toadstools, and gilded royals down at the low end.

Base play is a 243-ways board where an acorn acts as the wild, covering everything but the fairy house and the magic stone. The thing to watch is the middle reel. A second, special acorn lands only there, and whenever it does it hands you one of four completely different features at random.

The gentlest is a Respin: one spin with some reels held in place, where every ways-win it produces carries a x1, x2 or x3 multiplier. The Treasure Chest is richer, a chest holding up to five prizes drawn from the four bonus amounts, a straight cash prize, free games, or the Mighty Hat feature itself. Free Games run as a retriggerable round, and if the special acorn turns up again inside it, that's another 12 spins added on.

The Mighty Hat feature, the one the game takes its name from, is the build-up. Nine spins run automatically, the acorn that triggered it locks in as a gold border, and magic stones landing on the reels start stacking borders around the positions: an empty spot turns silver, silver upgrades to gold, gold to red, and every border stays held for the whole round. It plays like a hold-and-win, red the top rung. The four fixed prizes, Mini at 20x, Minor at 50x, Major at 500x and the Grand at 1,000x the bet, which is also as high as this game climbs, pay out through the chest and through Mighty Hat. No buy button and no ante, so that middle reel is the only door in.