Napoleon and Josephine Slot by Light & Wonder

The Napoleon symbol is the one to watch, because it's the only icon on these reels that pays from both ends. A run of Napoleons connects from the leftmost reel or from the rightmost reel, so the uniformed figure in the blue bicorne, often stacked top to bottom on a single reel, can light a line two different ways. Every other symbol pays left to right and nothing else. That single rule is what separates this from the dozens of period-themed line games it otherwise resembles.

The Wild only lands on the three middle reels and fills in for everything except the Josephine portrait and the numbered bonus symbols. Josephine is the scatter. Three, four or five of her award 10, 20 or 50 free spins, run on a separate reel set seeded with extra Wilds, which is the main reason the round produces more than the base game does. Here's the twist worth knowing: before any spin, a Josephine on the reels can be swapped for a special symbol carrying a number, and if that symbol is part of the trigger, its number is added on top. So a five-scatter hit doesn't have to stop at 50. It can pay more, depending on what those swapped symbols happen to be showing.

Two purchase routes exist if you don't want to wait. One buys the free spins outright. The other drops you into a Bonus Reels mode where every paying symbol is stripped off the strips and only Bonus and Super Bonus symbols plus blanks can land, which sharply raises your odds of entering the feature rather than handing it to you directly. It's the more interesting of the two, a gamble on entry odds instead of a flat ticket in.

The setting is unhurried French-Empire romance: rows of dark poplar trees flanking a country estate under a muted dusk sky, the reels sitting behind a polished gold border. The premium icons are painted period pieces, a brass field cannon on grass, a gilded royal carriage, a jewelled crown on a velvet cushion, a star medal on a red sash, with glossy card-suit gems and emerald necklaces filling the lower end. Navy reels, warm gold trim, jewel-tone art, the whole thing pitched as a love story rather than a war one.