Gold Collector Slot – Free Demo

Fifty fixed lines in a depleted mine shaft

Gold is seldom depicted with real miners in video slots. I understand - pickaxes aren't truly that exotic. But there's a rational explanation to why certain treasures are more frequently associated with slots than others. See, the promise of a hoard is simpler to sketch than the labour of digging it out. So designers reached for chests, coins and bars rather than the men gripping the shovel, and the custom stuck and was handed from one generation of slots to the next. All41 Studios puts the miner back on the reels and hands him the highest line prize. That is why you'll see nuggets and ingots appear so often in gold-themed slots still to this very day. Gold Collector's own hook is a coin respin round, and five jackpots sit behind it.

If you're dreaming of enormous wins, here's a rather plain yet ferocious slot capable of producing wins on par with jackpot slots, so don't let the plain look deceive you. All five of those jackpot prizes sit inside the Link&Win round rather than on the paylines. This monster packs a punch. A win at the top of that range has to come out of Link&Win; nothing the paylines do on their own gets close. It offers moderate volatility and an opportunity to bag up to 1,200 times your stake. Across 360 spins at a stake of 100 my biggest single result was 5,900.00 on spin 257, or 59 times the stake.

Gold Collector is as simple as it gets. It's played across 5-reels, 4 rows and 50 fixed paylines, and that pertains to both the gameplay as well as the layout. Line payouts are worked out from the initial bet, which is the total bet divided by the payline cost of 10. The reels come fully stacked with the customary card ranks and a handful of implements, set against a backdrop of a depleted mine shaft. What a spin pays is the sum of every line that pays on it. Starting from low to high value you'll see 10, J, Q, K and A sharing the lowest rung, then the shovel and the pickaxe even with each other, then the lantern, then the gold cart and finally the miner. The jackpot ladder runs down the left of the reels in cash rather than multiples, so at a bet of 100 the Grand reads 100,000.00 and the Mini 1,000.00. The latter is the top paying symbol on a full payline. Two of the session's better base results were 2,200.00 on spin 8 and 1,800.00 on spin 315.

The base game conceals the Link&Win feature. It hides the free spins too, and the dynamite Scatter that starts them appears on reels 2, 3 and 4 only. The paylines are entirely traditional, and you do have to land winning combinations starting from the leftmost reel. All 50 of them are in play on every spin, and the count cannot be lowered. They travel left to right on neighbouring reels, and only the highest win counts per line. The Coin symbol is the exception that runs the Link&Win round, and three of them anywhere is enough. The Gold Collector logo Wild lands on reels 2, 3 and 4 only, and it substitutes for everything except Scatters and Coins. Neither the Wild nor the Scatter carries a prize of its own.

Where the five jackpots actually live

Of the two moving parts of Gold Collector, the free spins bonus is one. Two rounds of it turned up across my 360 spins, on spin 205 and on spin 208. It's also what a lot of it comes down to. Between them they paid 15 times the stake and 45 times the stake. Here you will get spins that play out automatically at the bet and lines of the triggering spin. Neither of mine retriggered. Whatever they pay is added to your base game wins. The pair added 6,000.00 to a session that won 27,970.00 in all. To trigger it, land three dynamite Scatters anywhere. Since Scatters are held to reels 2, 3 and 4, that means one on each of those three reels. That will grant you 8 free spins to start with, and they can be retriggered. The same coin round and the same 96.40% turn up in Gold Collector Diamond Edition, which All41 Studios put out a year after this one.

The other one is Link&Win. It can start in the base game or during the free spins, though never on the spin that awards them. It's the reason the game is called what it is. Three or more Coin symbols anywhere set it off. Only the reels carrying a triggering Coin take part, and each of those reels receives 3 respins on its own meter while the screen displays nothing but Coins and blanks, and every Coin that lands is retained for the remainder of the feature. The round closes when no participating reel has a respin left, or when all of them are full. A reel's meter returns to 3 whenever at least one Coin lands on it, and each Coin bears a multiplier of the total bet taken from 2x up to 20x. Every coin prize is paid at the end of the feature rather than as each one lands. It gets even better, however: fill every spot on a reel and that reel's jackpot goes on top. Each jackpot belongs to its own reel, so the Grand rests on reel 5 alone being covered. Mini 10x on reel 1, Minor 20x on reel 2, Maxi 50x on reel 3, Major 100x on reel 4 and the Grand at 1,000x the total bet on reel 5. Filling a reel pays that jackpot as well as the coin values sitting on it.

The Minty Breakdown: Two bonus rounds carried a fifth of everything the session won, and they arrived three spins apart after two hundred spins of nothing much. Take those two rounds out and the 77.7% return has nowhere left to come from.

What 360 spins at a stake of 100 gave back

Less is more. That is no less true when it comes to betting. My run put 36,000.00 through the reels and got 27,970.00 back. On offer here is a calmer beast of a slot that grinds your balance down rather than obliterating it. The balance went from 100,000.00 to 91,970.00 over the session. Don't be startled to run into dry stretches. The peak was 101,620.00 on spin 9 and the lowest point 88,620.00. Across 360 spins at a stake of 100 only 96 paid anything at all, more than half of those for less than the stake. That is 27% of spins returning something. The longest losing run was 13 spins. It ended on spin 167, a little under halfway through. Landing a bonus, though, was worthwhile here. The first of the two came in with the balance at 89,330.00 and left it at 90,730.00. Two free spins rounds came three spins apart and paid 15x and 45x the stake between them, a fifth of everything the session won, and the session still finished at 77.7%.