Silent Samurai Slot by Playtech

For a game named after the samurai, the warrior barely factors into the paytable. He's the bonus symbol, and his one job is to set off the free spins. The top symbol is the Golden Dragon, a snarling gold head that doubles as the wild and the highest payer on the board. It stands in for everything except the geisha and the samurai, and five across a line returns 5,000x your line bet, the biggest single hit the base game can produce. The geisha runs the scatter role instead, paying from wherever she lands rather than along the nine lines.

Those nine lines are worth flagging, since most slots from Playtech carry far more, and it keeps the base game tight and old-fashioned. The free spins are where it opens up. Landing the samurai bonus starts a round of up to 27 spins, and every win inside it is multiplied by a flat 8x for the whole session, with more samurais retriggering extra spins on top. Because line pays reference the line bet and the dragon already caps things at 5,000x, that 8x is really where the fat totals come from. No buy option, no jackpot, so the samurai is the only way in.

The reels sit against a burning red-orange sunset, silhouetted pagodas and cherry blossom branches on both sides, with a carved gold pagoda roof and twin dragons over the top. Symbols are painted Japanese icons: the dragon head, a blue-and-gold kabuto helmet with a red war crest, the geisha, an old bronze coin with a square hole, and royals drawn as coloured kanji brush strokes. This is the plain 2013 original, not the later Mega Cash Collect reissue that piled on cash symbols and progressives.