Queen of the Wild Slot by Light & Wonder

One symbol on these reels breaks the rule every other slot follows. The Gorilla, the top premium in the paytable, pays from both ends of the grid. Land five from the left, you get paid. Land them right-to-left, you also get paid. Every other symbol on the board, the durian fruit, the gem-cut and wood-carved card suits, the coiled snake, sticks to the standard left-to-right read. It is a rare mid-2010s WMS design touch and it effectively doubles the chance the top-paying icon hits a winning line at 750x line stake.

The middle three reels are where the rest of the game lives. Wilds only land on reels 2, 3 and 4, and any Wild that does land instantly stretches to cover the whole reel. Hit one and the centre column turns solid. Catch wilds on all three middle reels at once and the entire middle of the grid becomes a wall of substitutes, with only the outer reels still showing regular icons. The expanding wilds substitute for everything except the paired-parrot FEATURE scatter, which keeps the bonus trigger separate from the wild math.

Three parrot scatters anywhere on the grid award 10 free spins. Four scatters jump to 25. Five scatters pay 100, which is rare for a 2013 release when most ladders of the era capped at 20 or 30. The bonus runs on an alternate reel set with heavier wild density on reels 2 to 4, so the expanding-reel trick fires more often. The same scatter ladder applies to retriggers during the round, and another five-scatter hit adds 100 more spins on top of what is left, which can chain into totals that get genuinely silly. The game also runs under the alternate title Amazon Queen in some markets and carries the sun-bleached Mayan archway and jungle palette that goes with that name.