Ivory Citadel Slot – Free Demo

Mystery coins on twenty fixed lines

I haven't examined Just for the Win very much here, and it's still a minor name, so it is easy to be unacquainted with this Swedish studio that's only been a power in this trade since 2016. Its slots reach players through Microgaming rather than through a lobby of its own. That's the curious thing.

Microgaming is so firmly linked with the large branded slots it circulates. Although Just for the Win slots reach the same casinos as Microgaming's, Just for the Win came to life as a new name. Under it coders, mathemagicians and slot makers could join together to build html5 games with a life and character of its own.

The slot I'm going to inspect here is one of the studio's Mystery Symbol slots, and Ivory Citadel is a 5-reel, 3-row slot with the same 20 fixed pay lines Adventures of Captain Blackjack and Piles of Presents run, launched on November 20, 2019. Line wins pay left to right, and a wild substitution is paid at the highest combination the line allows. The max win is quoted at 1,968 times the stake. The closest I came was 600.00 on a 15.00 stake, on spin 12.

The Wild and the citadel logo pay the same

There are no surprises involved when it comes to the symbols, and on the reels you will spot the usual low values as well as the Free Spins symbol and the Mystery Symbols. Between the card ranks and the top pair sit the red tiger, the purple buffalo and the green snake. The most rewarding, however, are the Wild and the Ivory Citadel logo. The two pay identically at three, four and five of a kind, so which of them fills a line makes no difference to the result. Both award 20.00 for 5 across a complete pay line at the paytable's shown stake.

Eight, ten and twelve, one of each in 440 spins

Land 3, 4 or 5 Free Spins symbols anywhere and the round awards 8, 10 or 12 free spins from the outset. I drew one of each size across the run: eight free spins on spin 26, ten on spin 65 and twelve on spin 219. Mystery Symbols drop in the base game and in the feature. They change into any symbol except the Free Spins symbol. Those three rounds paid 54.00, 570.00 and 300.00, or 3.6x, 38.0x and 20.0x the stake.

Now, every time a Mystery Symbol lands during the feature it sticks where it landed. With three rows on the grid, turning a reel Wild takes three of them in the same column. A reel packed with them turns Wild and remains Wild for the remainder of the round, and Wilds substitute for all symbols except the Free Spins symbol and the Mystery Symbols. Between them the three rounds accounted for 23% of everything I won. Across my three rounds no retrigger landed.

The Minty Breakdown: Three rounds of free spins carried 23% of everything Ivory Citadel paid me back, and the rest arrived in line wins that mostly came in under the 15.00 stake. The sticky coins are the only thing on the reels doing work the low values cannot, and they only stick inside the feature.

Spin 12 held up for the rest of the run

With the mechanics as simple as they are, it all comes down to playability, and it's tough to say anything about the hit frequency and balancing without truly having a fact sheet on hand or having performed thousands of spins. The balance peaked at 100,444.00 on spin 66, one spin after the largest of the free spins rounds.

I wagered 6,600.00 over 440 spins and received 3,966.00 back, a 60.1% return, with 126 paying spins of which 76 arrived in under the stake. It finished at 97,366.00, which was also the lowest point of the run. The free spins made up 924.00 of the total, the best single spin was 40 times the stake, and there's something about the playability in Ivory Citadel that comes off as a bit jerky and flat, with a barren run of 15 spins in the middle of it.

I can't see it winning over players from the studio's more famous slots, although I'm always glad to see new Mystery Symbol slots.