Gopher Gold Slot – Free Demo

A tunnelling gopher and five fixed lines

No, Gopher Gold is not about a shady character who is only interested in the cash in your pocket. That could be an intriguing theme, though. No, this Gopher Gold from studio Games Global clatters along after a tunnelling creature excavating gold out from beneath the earth. What it actually is, once you get past the tunnels, is a five reel base game with a wild and nothing else attached to it.

There are quite a few mining slots out there as you likely know. I played 500 spins of this one at a stake of 10.00. They are available in a broad range of styles, and Gopher Gold has adopted what seems to be a conventional approach at first. The reels carry the mining kit you would expect — dynamite, a pickaxe and gold pouch, a mine cart, a lantern — sitting above the 10 through A card ranks. It remains conventional, since there is no bonus round at all, and it won't win too many originality points. But it does bear a couple of oddities that might suit some players hunting for their own nuggets of gold.

Everything rides on the base reels

The game is not particularly volatile, weighing in around the middling mark at 3 out of 5, and RTP doesn't rock the boat either. I started the session with 1,954.80 in credits and closed it on 1,853.80. Its figure of 96.28% is squarely typical. The base game carries all of it, because there is nothing else in the game to carry any.

What a 16.00 line win looks like

The gameplay is straightforward, beginning with a grid that employs 5 reels, 3 rows, and 5 fixed paylines. The line count is fixed, so there is nothing to set on the interface but the stake. Winning combinations pay both ways, left to right and right to left. The frame I captured shows that working: three mine carts read right to left across reels three, four and five, two of those three positions filled by the Gopher wild, paying 16.00 at the 10.00 stake with credits sitting at 1,960.80. Only the largest win counts on each line.

The logo pays 12,000, the Gopher fills in

No big surprises when opening up the paytable, where top of the heap is the Gopher Gold logo, worth 12,000 coins for five on a line. Below it the order runs dynamite, pickaxe and gold pouch, mine cart, then the lantern and the card ranks.

Gopher Gold has one distinctive symbol players need to be aware of. That is the Gopher wild, which substitutes for any other symbol to help form a winning combination. Since the lines are read from both ends, it can complete a combination from either side of the grid. There is no scatter, there are no free spins, and there is no bonus buy.

153 spins paid, 87 of them under the stake

What seemed to be rather plain fare at first remained plain fare once the paytable had been read through, and then the lull set in. During testing, 500 spins passed by at a stake of 10.00, and 153 of them paid something. That is 31% of the run coming back with anything at all. 87 of those paid less than the stake was worth. Of course, fortune is fortune, and sometimes it's with you, sometimes it's not.

But if fortune's not on your side very little else occurs while playing Gopher Gold, so much so that it's very easy to lose patience and interest with the whole excavating enterprise. One stretch of 17 spins finished without a single win. That stretch ended on spin 119. The balance bottomed out at 868.80.

Spin 310 did a third of the work

But the math model behind the gloss produced waves of dead or low-value spins, and there were good days. Behind that one, the best spins I logged paid 280.00 on spin 125, 260.00 on spin 414, 250.00 on spin 102 and 150.00 on spin 8. My own best day arrived on spin 310, which paid 1,800.00, or 180 times the stake, and drove the balance to its peak of 2,658.80, though apart from line wins the game doesn't have a whole lot else to it. That single spin accounted for more than a third of everything the session returned. Across the 500 spins I wagered 5,000.00 and got 4,899.00 back, a session yield of 98.0%. That is 101.00 down over the run.

The Minty Breakdown: Take spin 310 out of the 500 and the 4,899.00 that came back off 5,000.00 wagered loses more than a third of itself, which leaves five fixed lines paying in both directions, the same count Crazy Chameleons runs and four fewer than Lucky Twins, with a wild as the only thing on the reels that changes what a spin can do.

Rocks in the back garden

It might be fine for a bit of low key amusement, though it's far from being a world-beater by any stretch. Across my run the only thing that ever paid was a line. Anyone else might have a better a time smashing rocks in the back garden, on the off chance someone's left a stray nugget lying around.