Zhao Cai Zhu: Gettin' Piggy With It Slot by IGT

The free games are built around catching pigs. Scatters on reels 1 and 3 plus a coloured lantern on reel 5 fire the 10 spin Bonus Feature, and the lantern colour decides how many pigs are guaranteed to show up over the round: blue gets you 11 to 40, green 16 to 60, red a hefty 26 to 100. A pig starts perched above each reel. When one jumps down onto a position, or a coin symbol lands there, a purple frame locks over that spot. Hit the same frame again and it climbs the ladder: purple to silver to golden to diamond. Diamond is the ceiling and stops upgrading. The payoff comes when a Dragon lands on reel 5, opening a door over every framed position to award whatever sits inside, and a diamond frame is the one that can pay out the Grand.

That Grand is the top of a four-tier fixed jackpot ladder (Mini, Minor, Major, Grand), each scaling with your coin value, and the jackpot set sits permanently on the left of the cabinet next to a fat golden piggy bank slumped on a pile of coins. The reels themselves are carved gold against a red festival stage hung with lanterns, mixing glossy card royals with gold ingots, red coin-knots, folding fans and ceremonial drums. It is loud, bright Lunar New Year dressing of the kind Chinese prosperity slots lean on, and the lucky pig (Zhao Cai Zhu is the wealth-bringing pig) is the whole hook.

In the base game the expanding wild does double duty. Land it on reels 2 through 5 and it fills the entire reel, then flies up into that piggy bank at the top. Every wild that gets banked has a random chance to trigger Pig A Prize, a pick round where you keep choosing coins until you turn up a Dragon. A Boost symbol there drops 50 to 500 extra coins onto several of the revealed prizes, and a super symbol can flip over anywhere from 250 to 2,500 coins in one go.

If you would rather not wait, the Bonus Buy button bottom-right opens four routes: roughly 50x for the blue feature, 100x for green, 150x for red, or 75x for a random draw of the three. So you are paying directly for a stronger guaranteed-pig band. Worth a word of caution though. This runs very high volatility, and a fistful of guaranteed pigs still won't save a round where none of them land on the high-value frames, so the buy price can vanish in a hurry.