Sold it Bonus Buy Slot Review

An auction house is clearing someone's estate, four bidders keep outbidding each other, and every win rides on how many of them show up. That much is Sold it, out a month earlier. This edition adds one thing to it: a shop with four prices.

The Wild Bidders land on reels 1, 2, 4 and 5, never the middle one, and each reveals a multiplier that starts at x1 and steps up by one with every extra Wild on screen. On a shared payline those multipliers get added rather than multiplied, so four Wilds comes to x10 and that is as high as a single line ever goes. Ten fixed lines, all of them running through reel 3, where the Scatter lives and nothing else can.

Base return is 96.16%, a third of spins land something, and the swings are medium-low (Evoplay publishes volatility as a span, Low to High, the same wide label the studio hangs on half its catalogue). Ceiling 3,532x. All identical to the original apart from four hundredths of a percent shaved off the top. The shop is the only difference that matters, and the shop is where this one loses.

The reels sit inside a carved mahogany auction frame under a red velvet curtain, lit like a saleroom after closing, deep plum shadow and warm gilt everywhere. An auctioneer stands at his lectern on the left in a dusty pink suit, bowler hat, round spectacles and a walrus moustache, gavel half raised. Below him a two-drum brass counter marked WILD MULTIPLIER ticks over as bidders arrive. On the right a lot waits under a red cloth behind a rope stanchion, plaque reading SCATTER, which is a nice bit of thinking: the thing you need is the one item nobody has unveiled.

The merchandise is a blue enamelled chest, a jade cat, a brass gramophone and a slim gold vase up top, then four antique coins in green, red, blue and gold filling the bottom four rows of the paytable. The Bidders are painted portraits in gilt ovals, a red-haired woman in a white fur stole, a slick young man in a pink shirt, a gaunt older man in a high collar, and they carry more personality than the antiques do. The Scatter is a golden toad squatting on a pink lotus. The antiques and treasure art is a strong point; four coins splitting one identical pay row is not.

Between features this drifts along pleasantly. Roughly a third of spins land something, most of it coins paying a fraction of the stake, and medium-low swings mean a balance erodes slowly instead of falling off a cliff. Rare for this studio. It is the best thing about the game.

The tension all sits on the middle reel. Watching that one position for the toad while counting Bidders on the outside reels is a specific kind of waiting, and it produces an unusual near-miss: a lone Scatter is a dead spin wearing the costume of a trigger. It happens often enough to sting.

And the shop never leaves your eyeline. The BONUS BUY plate is bolted to the auctioneer's lectern, sitting there through every spin, which is where a design puts a button it wants pressed. Knowing what those four prices actually return changes how that plate looks, probably for good.

The game underneath is fine. Same 96.16% as the December original, same 33% hit rate, same tidy multiplier ladder built around a middle reel no Wild can occupy, and a 3,532x ceiling sitting four hundredths of a percent under what the first edition reaches (Evoplay's page for this edition still quotes the original's number, which says something about how closely it was checked). Until you touch the shop, the two are the same game.

Touch the shop and it gets worse in four increments while telling you nothing. A buy menu that costs a little return is ordinary. A buy menu whose most expensive option is the worst-returning thing in the game, priced at 300x with a 172x jump for the final Wild, is a different proposition, and the fact that the board it sells really is the best one available makes that harder to see rather than easier.

Good idea, priced badly. Anyone drawn to this is better served by the original: identical game, slightly higher ceiling, no button asking to be pressed.