Bullion Bars Grab The Gold Slot – Free Demo

A pub cabinet cut down to three reels

Bullion Bars Grab The Gold is the outcome of Inspired Gaming's work on the bars-and-sevens format it also runs through Respin 7s. The bonus it carries is a pick game rather than a round of spins. It launched on May 24, 2021.

The pub fruit machine theme is present from the first screen, and as the name implies, Bullion Bars Grab The Gold is constructed around gold bullion. The bars in that pile are what the bonus pays from. A column of gold bars is piled beside the reels. That column is the Bullion Ladder, and it stands to the right of the grid.

Bullion Bars Grab The Gold is a 3-reel slot with up to 9 pay lines. The captured frame runs all nine of them at 0.50 per line, for a 4.50 total bet. You select how many of them are active, and the game has an arrangement of 3 rows. Three matching symbols on an active line are what a win takes. Lines pay left to right only, from the leftmost reel on neighbouring reels, and wins on separate played lines are summed together, with every win multiplied by the bet per line. The bet per line is also the figure the ladder multipliers work against. Of the spins that paid in this session, 64 returned less than the 4.50 stake.

Wild on top, mixed bars at the bottom

There is a group of standard symbols included in the game - mixed bars, single bars, mixed 7s and double bars at the low end, then the red, blue and yellow 7s as the high payers. The awards are printed in cash at a bet level the help panel never states, so none of them converts cleanly into a multiple of the stake. The Wild is above all of them as the top payer.

The Wild does its customary job and substitutes for everything except the three bonus triggering symbols. All three of those have to land on an active line for anything to happen. These arrive in the form of Grab, The and Gold. The rules give no trigger frequency for them.

The ladder moves whether the reels pay or not

If you've ever played an Inspired pub game such as Bullion Bars Gold Collector, then you've already witnessed this before, and if not, you will probably notice the column of gold bars standing to the right of the reels. The captured frame shows values such as x250 and x75 sitting on it. The column is unusual, and quite inventive I must admit, and each bar bears a multiplier. Those multipliers apply to the bet per line, not the total bet.

More significantly, the ladder shifts on its own, and every spin it steps down one place: the lowest bar departs and a new one appears at the top. It moves on every game, paid or not. Whatever values are resting there when the bonus triggers are the values you take into it. The pick itself is made from the three bars at the bottom of the ladder. The bars range between 5x and 999x the bet per line, and the ladder is retained across bet combinations. At the 0.50 per line the session ran, the top of that range is worth 499.50.

Picking bars instead of spinning reels

In the main game, landing the three vault symbols on an active line sets off the Grab the Gold bonus, and the three bars at the base of the ladder are displayed face down in random order. Eight of these came up over the test, the first on spin 30 for 43.20. You choose one. There is no spin involved at any point of it. Its prize is added to the Total Win. Spin 55 paid 94.50 that way, and spin 64 added 130.50 nine spins later.

The pick bonus is how pick bonuses typically are, and the ladder then steps down three positions for the coming round. The values for the next round are the three that come to rest at the bottom. The new bars arriving at the top may bear Collect, and picking Collect finishes the bonus. How often a Collect bar is placed is not something the rules quantify. So there is indeed some cash to win. The smallest of the eight rounds here, on spin 134, paid 8.10. But what you really want to do in this slot is to light the whole Super Bar Trail.

Minty’s Final Note: Eight bonus rounds in 370 spins put 1,486.80 credits on the board, 66% of everything the session won, and the reels between them never made up the difference on their own.

Ten rounds to the safe

Each finished bonus round lights one arrow on the trail, and finishing round 10 lights the whole thing and opens the safe to free the Super Bar. Rounds carry on until a Collect is picked, so reaching ten of them takes a run of clean picks. Its value is disclosed before it joins the top of the ladder. A player who reaches that far has a 1 in 3 chance of picking it. Super Bar values range between 1000x and 9999x the bet per line, and the rules put no number on getting that far. At the 0.50 per line used here, that is between 500.00 and 4,999.50.

What 370 spins on the ladder showed

What the makers did here was to take an old format and hold it to three reels and nine lines. The balance peaked at 1,859.05 on spin 253 and bottomed out at 838.45. They hung the potential on a ladder of multipliers instead of the paytable. The longest stretch without a win ran 13 spins, ending on spin 46. The max win is 250,000.00 in a single spin, excluding jackpots, and the panel cautions that not every bet configuration can attain it. Both the ladder value and the bet per line feed the same multiplication, so the two have to line up for a figure like that.

The added potential doesn't mean that your odds of leaving the slot in profit have risen, and testing the game for this review I had no difficulty at all triggering the bonus. The gaps between them ran from 9 spins to 70. 370 spins at a 4.50 stake yielded eight bonus rounds, 122 paying spins, and an ending of 1,591.75 from a 1,000.00 beginning, a 135.5% return. That is 1,665.00 wagered against 2,256.75 returned. The bonus rounds accounted for 66% of everything won. In cash that came to 1,486.80 across the eight. The large one arrived on spin 246. The balance stood at 1,825.30 after it. It paid 697.50, or 155.0x the stake. The next best was 322.20 on spin 207, at 71.6x.

With that said, at a declared 95.00% RTP and a volatility of 3 out of 5, this is a stable game rather than a generous one. The five biggest wins of the session all had a bonus round in them. But does it really mean anything when everything worth having rests behind the ladder?