Pirots 5 Slot by ELK Studios

The fifth Pirots release ships in pieces. Right now you only get the Cursed Temple, an Egyptian catacomb variant launched 28 June; The Kraken arrives end of August, the Mayan City of Gold and the Boss Castle land in late September. They all share the same game ID and the same four pirate parrots - Captain Redfeather, Hank, Aaron and Skipper - but each world rewires the trap set, and Boss Castle only unlocks permanently once you've gathered all 9 hidden tokens spread across the other three. It's an unusual rollout model. Older entries in the series shipped as single complete games.

The Temple grid starts at 6x6 with a jewel-encrusted collection meter mounted above on what looks like hammered gold flanked by burning torches, hieroglyph columns bracing each side, and a pharaoh-mask crown at the top. Fill that meter and the playable area pushes outward, eventually reaching 8x8. The four birds wander the grid one step at a time, each one picking up adjacent gems of its matching color (Redfeather takes red, Hank purple, and so on), and every collection chain triggers fresh drops that keep the sequence alive. Wilds count for any color, but each bird can only grab a wild once per spin, which puts a soft cap on how much a single wild can do.

Three things make the Temple variant feel meaner than older Pirots installments. Captain Blackfeather, a ghost pirate, occasionally hijacks an adjacent bird, paints every matching gem in Blackfeather purple, and clears the lot in one sweep. The arrow shooters on the rim fire when birds get stuck, swapping a bird's collected gems into another color and removing that bird entirely; if all four go down, whatever's left on the grid converts to coin symbols. And boulders ranging from 2x2 up to 4x4 can be queued onto the grid, rolling across and crushing anything that isn't a feature symbol.

Bonus entry takes three bonus scrolls collected in a single spin, which awards 5 drops with the grid size, gem levels and meter progress all carrying in from the trigger spin. Land a Super Bonus icon among those three and every drop additionally rains coins. The X-iter menu ladders up through five tiers: 3x and 10x for boosted trigger odds, 50x for the standalone Cursed Temple coin game, 100x for guaranteed bonus entry, and 250x for the Super version with coin rain pre-loaded into every drop. ELK has been running a flat 94% on most releases since late 2022, so the 96.0% here is a meaningful bump for what amounts to their flagship pirate series.