Wild West Wilds Slot by Playtech

The Sheriff's silver star badge is what carries this one. On the base reels it plays as an ordinary wild, standing in for every paying symbol and, tied with the moustached gunslinger up top, handing the fattest line pay at 1,000x the line bet for five across. But catch it inside a respin or the free games and it switches jobs: the badge locks to its spot and stays put for the rest of the round. Each new one that lands sticks too, so wilds pile up from spin to spin and the wins keep building on reels you're no longer paying to turn.

Two things start those rounds, both off the revolver scatter, which pays from anywhere rather than along a line. Two revolvers open a respin, usually a single one, occasionally as many as five. Three revolvers hand over the free games, somewhere between five and ten spins with the count leaning low, plus a flat multiplier of x1, x2 or x3 that holds for the whole round and is weighted hard toward x1. Modest on paper. The stacking wilds are what make either round worth reaching, since a couple of badges pinned down early can leave you with half a grid of substitutes by the finish.

The setting is a sun-bleached frontier town, weathered saloon fronts boxing in the reels along a dusty main street under a wide blue sky. The character art is properly painted rather than cartooned: the sheriff levelling his revolver with the gold star pinned to his coat, a purple-coated gunslinger chewing a cigar, a red-dressed saloon woman with a folding fan, a green-hatted cowgirl with a rifle over one shoulder, then rusted stone-carved A, K, Q and J down at the low end. No buy button and no jackpot anywhere. It all comes down to those two scatter triggers and how many sheriff badges you can get to stick.