Winfall Slot by Light & Wonder

Forget wilds, scatters and free spins, because Winfall has none of them. Wins come from matching gems alone. Land three or more of the same colour sitting next to each other and they pay, but only when they run in a straight line, across or down the grid, never on a diagonal. The faceted stones come in five colours: a round yellow citrine, a red kite-cut diamond, a square purple princess-cut, a green clover-shaped emerald and a blue octagon sapphire, all glinting inside an ornate gold border set against deep purple draped velvet. The blue and red stones turn up most often in a typical spin, while a single green clover across the top row is one of the better individual hits.

Every paid combination clears and the stones above drop into the gaps, with new ones falling from the top. Fresh matches pay and clear again, and the cascade keeps repeating until a drop produces nothing. That chain is doing double duty. Down the left side runs a ladder of six chevron arrows, and each cascade step that pays anything lights one more arrow. String together six paying cascades off a single spin, light all six, and you open the Extra Diamonds round.

Extra Diamonds is a disc of 16 stops: 12 cash prizes and four x2 markers. A lamp circles the disc and stops on one. Hit a cash stop and you take that amount, and the round is over. Hit an x2 and every one of the 12 cash values doubles, then the lamp spins again. It can keep doubling as long as those x2 markers keep landing, which is where the disc feature earns its place over a plain instant prize. There is a ceiling, though. No cash value climbs past 500x your stake, and once all twelve have hit that cap the x2 markers convert into 500x stops for one last spin. That 500x is the whole game's top award.

It is a bright, traditional gem slot at heart, the kind that would sit comfortably on a casino floor, with the cascade-counting meter as the one idea that sets it apart from the usual match-and-tumble crowd.