Royal Kingdom Slot – Free Demo

The dragon does the substituting

Creator Betixon leads players on a journey. I played 370 spins of it in one sitting. The journey is with a flame-breathing dragon in the fantasy-themed slot Royal Kingdom. The dragon is also the wild, so the theme's lead character is the one doing the substituting. It is kitted out in a dragon wild, a sticky wild mechanic, and a free spins round. Wins pay left to right, starting from the leftmost reel.

Its 5-reel, 3-row playing field is bound together by 25 fixed paylines, and only the highest win on each line is paid. Each of my spins cost 12.50, since the lines cannot be switched off.

Worth 1,000 coins for five of a kind on a line, the dragon is the top symbol. Below it come the sorceress, the king and the squire, then the card ranks from ace down to nine. The dragon wild also substitutes for any standard pay symbol. Because only the best win on a line counts, a wild that completes two combinations on the same line pays the better one and nothing more. It stands in for everything bar the scatter and the bonus. The scatter is the tree face, and it pays from anywhere on the reels rather than along a line.

A wild that counts down on the reels

Royal Kingdom is constructed around a free spins round, and along the way players profit from sticky wilds. The two are separate: the sticky wilds are a base game affair, and the free spins arrive on their own trigger.

Whenever a wild lands on the reels during the base game, it sticks to its reel for 3 spins, and bear in mind the stake is frozen while sticky wilds are active. The held wild carries a counter that ticks down as it goes, and I caught a frame with two dragons on the bottom row of reels one and two, the second reading 1, with 14.50 paid on line 3.

The trigger is three tree faces

Next up is Free Spins. It came up twice in my 370 spins, on spin 47 and again on spin 192. It is triggered when 3 or more tree face scatters land anywhere on the reels, and three, four or five scatters also award 1x, 5x or 25x the total bet. A trigger grants 10 free spins. The first of mine paid 275.00, 22 times the stake, on top of the 12.50 the triggering spin paid in the base game. Every win during the round is paid at a x2 multiplier, and retriggers are possible, with no cap on them. Neither of my rounds retriggered.

The Minty Breakdown: A dragon wild holds its position for three spins and the stake control locks while it does, so the base game between triggers is largely a matter of watching a counter run down. Two triggers came in 370 spins, 145 apart, and they carried 30% of everything the session won.

Two rounds did most of the earning

Royal Kingdom is a game with a lot happening from low-level wins to sticky wilds to a doubled bonus round. The two triggers were 145 spins apart. To be honest, during testing my money came almost entirely from Free Spins. My peak balance, 5,183.75, arrived on spin 47 with the first of them. Two triggers across 370 spins paid 1,000 credits between them, 30% of everything won. Everything outside the rounds stayed small, the best of it 162.50 on spin 269 and 150.00 on spin 282. The bigger of the two returned 58 times the stake. That was 725.00 on spin 192, and it took the balance from 4,052.50 to 4,765.00. Even so, the session finished at 71.4%. The balance ran from 5,000.00 down to 3,675.00, which was the lowest point of the session. Only 131 spins in 370 paid anything at all, and 80 of those paid less than the stake. The longest gap without a win was 10 spins, ending on spin 295.

The 25 payline layout may be off-putting for some. Others, though, will relish the sticky wilds and the doubled free spins of Royal Kingdom.