Big Egyptian Fortune Slot – Free Demo

An Egyptian lock-and-collect with no spin counter

Fresh slots from Inspired Gaming invariably bring on a tremendous sense of anticipation, and I flock to observe the volatility. I played 210 spins of this one at 5.00 a spin. Some of us are in captivation; others are dismayed and terrified, almost like a throng assembling to witness an execution. Across those spins the balance went from 1,000.00 down to 851.50. The firm has mastered the craft of the lock-and-collect bonus. Here the treasure symbols lock in place where they land and pay out when an explorer arrives. They've been doing things few other suppliers have dared to attempt.

One thing, in particular, stands out with this slot - the open-ended shape of the Big Treasure bonus. It starts on 3 or more bonus symbols landing anywhere in view, and those symbols are the one case where adjacent reels do not matter. It lasts until the Big Treasure is collected rather than for a set number of spins.

Big Egyptian Fortune is an Inspired Gaming powered slot with 5 reels, 3 rows and 10 win lines, and it pays left to right on neighbouring reels from the leftmost reel. Only the highest award is paid on each winning combination, and wins on separate lines are added together. It returns an RTP of 94.80% and sits at 4 out of 5 for volatility, launched on May 26, 2022. My own run of 210 spins wagered 1,050.00 and returned 901.50 of it. Players can wager from 0.20 to 100.00 per round. Spin Chance covers the awkward moment when the credit drops below the price of a spin but is still above zero: a pointer runs across a green and red meter, and green buys one more spin at the current bet while red takes what is left.

The ankh, the urns and a wild that stays in the bonus

As is frequently the case, the ankh is the most lucrative of all the symbols. The collar comes next at 100 times the stake for five, with the bracelet and the Eye of Horus level on 50. It returns a win of 200 times the stake for 5 across an entire payline, and it is also the sole symbol that pays for 2 of a kind. Two ankhs are worth half the stake. The eight treasure urns pay as one symbol in any arrangement, worth 20 times the bet for 5, 5 times for 4 and 1 times for 3. The five card ranks are all priced the same, 10 times the stake for five and 2.5 times for four. The cash values printed on the treasures pay only in the bonus.

The explorer is the wild, standing in for all symbols except the bonus symbols. That takes in the treasure urns and the ankh alike. It is also the sole symbol restricted to a single portion of the game, showing on all reels in the bonus game only. The treasure values it collects there are multiples of the base game bet. There is no base-game wild at all.

The Minty Take: Two bonus rounds, two spins apart, produced 52% of everything my 210 spins won, and the other 208 spins are what you sit through to reach them.

Three matching tiles set the Big Treasure

Players need to watch out for at least 3 bonus symbols anywhere in sight to trigger the Big Treasure bonus. Any line wins landing on the same spin as the trigger are added to the bonus win. That grants unlimited free spins - there is no set spin count and no retrigger, and this is of course where it turns genuinely interesting. Both of my own triggers arrived inside a two-spin window, on spins 52 and 54. Put on the spot, players are given a match 3 game of 6, 9 or 12 tiles depending on the trigger size. Tiles are turned one at a time until three matching values come up. This is what fixes the value of the Big Treasure. That figure then sits on the largest treasure for the whole round. Three bonus symbols play for 100x, 50x, 30x or 20x, four for 100x, 50x or 30x, and five for 100x or 50x.

Once the bonus is in motion, treasures lock in place where they land, and an explorer landing with treasure in view pays every treasure value displayed. My first trigger, on spin 52, paid 215.00 from a 5.00 stake and moved the balance from 916.00 to 1,126.00. Each additional explorer pays them all again. The 1,367.00 the second round finished on was the highest the balance got all session. The round concludes when an explorer collects the Big Treasure, or when all 15 positions are locked with it. That second bonus paid 250.00, the biggest single win I had. Over my own 210 spins I triggered the bonus twice, two spins apart, for 43.0x and 50.0x the stake. The screen these rounds play out on is a grid of locked treasures with their cash values printed across them.

Between them those two rounds made up 465.00 of the 901.50 I won - 52% of everything, and in that sense, I got the impression that, in this game at least, the base game is little more than an antechamber. My best base-game spins were two at 65.00, 13.0x the stake, on spins 34 and 125.

The wait between two triggers

A lot of folk will view this as another lock-and-collect slot, granted. The collector is the explorer, and it turns up on all five reels once the bonus is running. That is understandable given the evident resemblances. Big Fishing Fortune, out from the same studio on December 1, 2021, is the near twin of this build with the same 10 lines and the same 94.80% RTP, while Scroll of Egypt keeps the Egyptian theme over 5 lines. However, what I see is the format carried one step further by stripping the spin count altogether, and admittedly, I was wishing for something a bit more inventive. Nothing substitutes for the bonus symbols, so a trigger has to land three of them unaided. The Egyptian theme itself is less important to me.

This is assuredly not for the faint-hearted. The best the match 3 game can hand you is a Big Treasure worth 100x the stake, and that needs three of those tiles to come out. The wait between bonuses is what will divide the sheep from the goats, and my own 210 spins came back at 85.9%, with only 50 paying spins and a barren run of 16 in a row. That dry run ended on spin 124, and 30 of the paying spins came back under the 5.00 stake. Without those two bonus rounds it would have appeared a great deal worse.