Golden Mane Slot – Free Demo

Horses, Lines and a Wild That Pays

A slot named Golden Mane is from Light & Wonder. Light & Wonder is also behind Medusa Megaways and Dancing Drums Explosion. It employs the Scatter Run Feature to power the play along with Free Games. Free Games paid 231.00 across my session, 47% of everything I won.

Power it does. I played 390 spins from a starting balance of 1,000.00, which never rose higher and bottomed out at 760.90. Golden Mane is a quick-moving game, and it's basically a payline slot that unfolds on a play grid in a 5x3 format, with 10 paylines. Only the highest win on each payline is paid, and wins on different paylines are added together.

Arriving with an RTP figure of 96.96%, generated by its extremely volatile maths framework, Golden Mane plays 10 lines for 15 coins, and my stake was 1.50 per spin. Those 390 spins cost 585.00 in stakes and returned 493.80, a session return of 84.4%.

Being a payline slot means players earn a win when identical symbols land on successive reels from the far-left reel, and all regular payouts are 9 to A royals, Mountain, Tree, Black Horse and White Horse symbols worth 4.67-46.67x the wager for five of a kind. Of my 390 spins, 69 paid something, and 35 of those paid less than the 1.50 stake. One last symbol, for now, is the Wild. It also pays on its own, from 0.33x the bet for two up to 100x for five. It is substituting for all symbols except Scatters. The Scatter pays in any position, and its win is added to whatever the paylines pay on the same spin.

Where the Horseshoes Can Land

On paper, Golden Mane adopts a familiar framework. It is one of landing Scatters to activate extras and Free Games. In my session that happened twice, on spin 214 and again on spin 383. However, in reality, Light & Wonder departs from the typical manner of handling things with the aid of a few tidy tweaks.

The Scatter Run Feature

The Scatter Run Feature can be earned randomly on any paid spin. It is supplying Scatters to reels 2, 3 and 4. Those are the only reels the Scatter can land on, so the feature works on exactly the positions that trigger Free Games.

Four Symbols Turn Wild in Order

6 Free Games are granted when 3 Scatters land on reels 2, 3 and 4. My first round came on spin 214 with 3 Scatters, and its 6 Free Games paid 84.00, or 56.0x the stake, with no retrigger. 2 Scatters grant 2. Those 2 Scatters also pay on their own, 0.67x the bet, in addition to the 2 Free Games. Free Games employ an upgraded variant of the base game, with the White Horse, Black Horse, Mountain and Tree becoming Wild in sequence over the opening four Free Games, and they can be re-activated. That means a 2-game round ends with only the White Horse and Black Horse turned Wild, while a 6-game round plays its last two games with all four changed.

Our Minty Verdict: The Free Games are built as a countdown in reverse: each of the first four games hands another symbol to the Wild, so a 2-game round stops halfway through the build and a 6-game round gets to play two games with the whole set converted. Even the short version produced my biggest spin, 148.00 on a 1.50 stake, and the round carried 47% of what the session paid back.

What 390 Spins at 1.50 Left

The additional Wilds the Free Games hand out are fine ones too, and there might not be anything outrageously leading edge. My 2-game round on spin 383 paid 147.00, or 98.0x the stake, and with the 1.00 Scatter win the spin came to 148.00, the largest of my session. But, like everything else in the game, the additional Wilds contribute to the general rhythm. They can be efficient at churning out solid hits, and employing figures to demonstrate this final point, I found winning capacity of up to 1,500x the wager.