Mythic Maiden Slot – Free Demo

The maiden hangs there through the whole base game

An iron maiden hangs beside the reels and stays shut for the whole of the base game. You frequently encounter a slot with the word 'Maiden' in the title. The sense isn't instantly obvious. Nothing in the base game is doing anything to anybody; the reels there run on spiders, chests, books and card ranks. Normally after a few spins, or a skim of the paytable, the theme becomes evident, and there must be a torture room somewhere over at NetEnt because Mythic Maiden, launched in November 2011, means the iron sort. It is fastened to the middle of the free spins round. It opens when the round begins, reveals after each spin while the round runs, and closes with it. Blood Suckers and Dead or Alive are other NetEnt machines carried on this site.

Thirty fixed lines under a tripling Wild

The 5-reel, 30-payline layout pays left to right. The 30 lines are fixed, and the bet is set by level and coin value rather than by switching lines on and off. Only the largest win on each line counts. Line wins pay in succession from the leftmost reel rightwards, so a screen with several lines lit resolves one at a time.

Standard pay symbols extend to a shrunken head at the top. Below it sit the skull, the book with the iron hand, the spider and the chest, and then the card ranks from A down to 10. It is worth 2,000 coins per line for five of a kind, and the Wild substitutes for any symbol except the Scatter, and any bet line win containing a Wild pays three times as much. I caught one of those in a frame at the 1.50 stake: a single Wild on reel 1, a base-game win of 87 coins or 4.35 credits, and a balance of 993.85 after it.

How the round starts and what the maiden hands out

The feature here is Free Spins, and to trigger it you'll require 3 or more Scatters to land anywhere on the reels. The Scatters don't have to sit on a bet line; position doesn't matter, only the count. Three Scatters grant 10 free spins, four grant 15, and five grant 30. Two do nothing at all, which is what a second frame from the same session shows — Scatters lit on reels 4 and 5, no third anywhere, a base-game win of 84 coins or 4.20 credits, and a balance of 974.95.

During the round, the iron maiden dangling beside the reels stands open. Whatever it shows arrives once the spin has resolved, and a multiplier it gives holds for the rest of the round. After each spin it can reveal these:

• Free Spins – up to two additional spins are added to the round.
• Multiplier – up to x10, applied to the current round and to every bet line win, Wild wins included.

There is no buy option. Free Spins have to come from Scatters landing in the base game.

What sixty-five free spins actually paid

Mythic Maiden is strange because the base game is the very opposite of a horror show, and if less is more, then maybe it qualifies. I played 470 spins at 1.50, so 705.00 went through the machine. That reasoning really runs against the grain when it comes to a game built around a torture contraption. The maiden stays shut for every one of those base-game spins. Over 470 spins the reels paid on 143 of them. The longest stretch with nothing at all was 14 spins, and it ended on spin 398. Half of those paid back less than the stake, and it's difficult to recall many spins that stood out on their own. The balance bottomed out at 898.45 and peaked at 1,612.60 on spin 306.

Maybe the bonus was always intended to carry the game? The first one took 156 spins to turn up. Four rounds appeared across the session. They came on spins 156, 184, 240 and 306, for 10, 15, 30 and 10 free spins. Between them they paid 702.00, which is 61% of everything won. Three of the four paid 22.50, 30.00 and 31.50, between 15 and 21 times the stake. A retrigger never arrived at all in four rounds. Sixty-five free spins ran and the maiden never once added a spin to any of them.

The Minty Take: Four rounds ran across 470 spins and between them they carried 702.00 of the 1,143.00 the session won, but 618.00 of that came out of the single 30-spin round on spin 240. Across all sixty-five free spins the maiden never handed back a spin.

Spin 240 against the other 469

This leads to the next Mythic Maiden puzzle. Getting anywhere near the top of the game means the maiden handing over its x10 and a long line arriving underneath it, inside a round that has to keep extending itself to give both the chance. Get the bonus round going crazy, and NetEnt notes wins of up to 600,000 coins are possible; the slot's figures put that at 2,100 times the bet, an imposing haul to be sure. The multiplier applies to every bet line win in the round, including the ones already tripled by a Wild. Yet the best the game managed here was a 30-spin round on spin 240 worth 618.45, or 412.3 times the stake. The base game paid 0.45 on that same spin, and the balance went from 961.00 to 1,577.95. The session finished at 1,438.00 from a 1,000.00 start. That is 1,143.00 won against 705.00 wagered. That was a return of 162.1%, and most of it came from the maiden. Take spin 240 out of it and the other three rounds are worth 84.00 between them.

Mythic Maiden is a respectable enough game. The best the base game managed on its own was 64.50 on spin 110, 43.0 times the stake. The base game just didn't seem worth the trouble to sit through.