Sahara Riches: Cash Collect Slot by Playtech

Everything on this game funnels through one symbol, and it only ever lands on reel 5. The Cash Collect coin sweeps up every gold cash-coin showing on the grid the moment it appears, and coins carry face values running from 5 up to 100. The blue collector coins stamped +3, +4, +5, +7 or +10 pile their bonus onto whatever that sweep already gathered. Miss the Cash Collect symbol on a given spin and those coins pay nothing at all. They just sit there and vanish. So a screen full of gold is worth exactly what reel 5 decides to let it be worth.

The standard paytable barely registers next to that. Five of the top premium returns a small line win, the gem-cut royals even less, because the payouts come from the coins rather than the painted icons. The wild is a green-eyed woman in a jewelled desert veil who lands as a full-reel stack, covering an entire column and standing in for the regular symbols, though she never turns into a coin or the collector.

Four jackpots sit across the top, Mini through Grand, and they arrive as diamond coins. Like every other coin they only pay when the Cash Collect symbol scoops them up. The Grand is the ceiling at 500x your stake, which is also the most this game hands out in one go.

Free games rework how the coins behave. Trigger the round and every Cash Collect symbol that drops locks onto the reels for three spins, harvesting whatever coins land on each of those three spins instead of clearing after one. There's no buy option, so that freeze round only comes the slow way. This is the original build, before the beefed-up MAX edition stretched the coin values further. Around the reels: rolling golden dunes, a white domed palace on one side, a palm oasis on the other, with a green treasure chest, a jade camel figurine, a pink spinning top, a jewelled dagger and a golden hourglass filling out the higher symbols.