Totem Guardians Slot by Relax Gaming

Carved wooden totems flank the reels on either side, set against a misty primeval forest with a tribal camp tucked behind the trees. The grid starts at six reels by four rows, but three additional rows sit dormant above, sealed behind stone runes until Bonus symbols crack them open. At full reveal you're looking at 1,193 connected ways, up from 466 in the locked starting state.

The pay structure is the first thing that throws people. This isn't a regular ways slot. Each next symbol in a winning chain has to land in the same row as the previous one, OR exactly one row above, OR one row below on the adjacent reel. Diagonal jumps wider than that break the connection. So a long six-of-a-kind across all reels has to physically snake through the grid without skipping rows.

Then the signature mechanic kicks in. Every paying symbol carries its own multiplier, starting at x1. When a win lands, the winning symbols and every other copy of that same symbol on the grid get cleared off, and each removed symbol bumps that symbol's multiplier by +1 (capped at x100). Wolf masks pay one multiplier, eagle masks another, and so on, tracked separately on the totem column to the right of the reels. These persist across spins. Build a wolf totem to x12 in the base game and it stays at x12 next spin, and the spin after that. Wilds appear on reels 2-6 only and substitute for paying symbols, but they don't feed the multiplier engine.

Bonus symbols do triple duty: each one revealed adds a row to the grid, boosts the symbol-collection rate by +1x, and counts toward the three-Bonus trigger. Hit three across a round and you get five free spins from Relax Gaming's standard FS structure, except all your accumulated totem multipliers carry straight in, and the full 7-row grid is unlocked from spin one. Each Bonus during the round adds another spin.

The Buy Feature is where things get interesting. At 60x bet you skip into Free Spins directly, and the buy option runs at 96.87%, a hair higher than the base 96.1%. You inherit whatever multipliers you've already built, so buying after a long base session where you've stacked the wolf or jaguar to x40+ hits very differently than buying cold. The trade-off: you lose the row-reveal progression that makes the base game's expanding grid feel like it's unlocking in real time.