Samurai Fury Slot by Playtech

The base game is a plain 20-line setup, and it leans almost entirely on what happens once you trigger the free games. Before that, the one thing worth tracking is the gold war-shield stacked Wild, which only lands on reels 2, 3 and 4. It arrives stacked, fills those middle reels top to bottom, and swaps in for every paying symbol. On a 20-liner that central coverage is where most of the base-game wins come from.

Three Scatters, landing on reels 1, 3 and 5, hand you 10 free games. This round is where the game earns its keep. A Samurai symbol now shows up on reel 5, and its job is subtraction: when a paying combination and the Samurai land on the same spin, those winning symbols are stripped off the reels and you get +1 free game. Several symbol types can be cleared at once, so a single busy spin can stack up multiple retriggers. A win multiplier runs through the whole round on top of that.

The Wild stays in play during the free games too, so it isn't wiped when the round starts and those middle reels keep feeding the multiplier. Visually it's samurai slots by the book: an armoured warrior in a horned red helmet, a white tiger, a black war horse and a red pagoda against a dusk battlefield under a purple-to-crimson sunset, with a Mt Fuji and cherry-blossom disc rounding out the premiums and gold royals below them. Handsome enough, but it's a theme you've seen a hundred times. From Playtech studio Psiclone Games, the whole thing hinges on stretching that 10-spin round with the Samurai clears rather than on anything the base game brings.