Piggy Holmes Dice Slot by GameArt

This is the dice-cube version of GameArt's Piggy Holmes - same maths, same features, but every symbol is etched onto the face of a large grey-and-black dice cube. The reels become five towers of these cubes, and you read the detective story off them: a gold revolver, a smoking pipe, gold handcuffs, a magnifying glass and the high-pay clue icons sit on the premium faces, with coloured A/K/Q/J royals filling the low end. The setting behind the dice is a gas-lit Victorian London back-alley at night, wet cobbles catching the glow of a street lamp, brick walls closing in, a hint of Big Ben in the distance. The Piggy Wild substitutes for everything except the Scatter and the Golden Piggy Coin, which keeps both bonus triggers honest.

The free spins round is the strange one. Land three Scatters - they only show up on reels 1, 3 and 5 - and you get 6 spins plus a 3x total-bet payout up front. Then the layout changes. The three middle reels (2, 3 and 4) lock together and spin as one giant symbol covering the whole central block, and the round runs on its own separate paytable. A gigantic Scatter landing during the feature adds 3 more spins and pays 1x bet, and there's no cap on how often that retriggers, so a hot run can stretch much longer than the opening 6 suggests.

The other headline is the Golden Piggy Coin hold and win. Land 6 or more coins and the reels swap out for special coin-only reels. You start with 3 respins, any coin that reveals a cash value sticks, and every new prize coin resets the counter back to 3. Each locked coin holds a random cash amount or one of four jackpots - Mini, Minor, Major or Grand. When the respins finally dry up, every locked value gets totalled and paid. Fill all 15 positions and you take the Grand, worth about 1000x bet. That full-grid fill is rare though, so the Grand is more a carrot than a realistic target on most sessions. This whole feature can also fire mid free spins, which is the best-case scenario for the game.

There's no buy feature and no gamble, so both bonuses are reached the honest way. The jackpot ladder runs across the top of the dice stack under the chrome logo, Grand down to Mini, so you can always see what the Piggy Respins are playing for. One honest mark against it: the top end caps at 2,294.2x bet, which is modest for a hold-and-win build, and outside the Grand jackpot you're rarely chasing anything close to a four-figure multiplier. The detective-noir mood does carry it, moody blues and gold accents, a pig in a deerstalker working a case across fifteen dice faces.