Wild Plunder Slot by Light & Wonder

Most slots that promise roaming wilds just shuffle a sticky symbol a column over. This one actually walks. Two or more Jolly Rhonda Wilds, the red-haired captain in the tricorn hat, fire off the Wild Spins round, and from there every Rhonda on the reels slides one reel to the left at the start of each re-spin, landing on a random row and locking in place for that spin. When a wild finally reaches reel one it drops off on the next spin, so the whole round is a slow drift of wilds marching toward the left edge before they vanish. Land extra Rhondas during the round and you keep extending it, up to a base of five spins plus whatever the trigger spin handed you.

On that first trigger spin there is a bonus on top. Every Jolly Rhonda turns the high symbols sitting next to it, the octopus, treasure chest, ghost in a barrel and frothy beer mug, into the Wild Plunder logo wild for that spin. So a single captain can light up a whole cluster of her neighbours before the roaming even starts.

What keeps the base game busy is that wilds can show up without you triggering anything. Three random features run in the background. Wild Currents spins the globe behind the reels and, if the skull-marked volcano island settles above the centre, scatters three to nine logo wilds across reels two, three and four. Rhonda's Re-Spin steps in when exactly one captain lands, holding her reel and respinning the rest to chase a second one. And the Kraken can surface at the end of any spin to slap one or more positions into Jolly Rhonda Wilds, sometimes enough to roll straight into Wild Spins.

The look is bright cartoon piracy rather than anything grimy. The five reels float right on a sheet of turquoise ocean with no border around them, a galleon drifting at the left horizon and the volcano island smoking at the top. Coin tokens carved with gold, silver, bronze and wood skulls fill out the low end. If you like the layered random-wild approach, the same studio's Longbeard's Chest runs a different spin on the high-seas haul, and there is a deeper bench of pirate titles to raid through.