Wildhound Derby Slot – Free Demo

A Golden Hare decides when the dogs move

Wildhound Derby puts four Wild Dogs on reel 5 and lets a Golden Hare decide when any of them moves. I can't say I got super thrilled, loading Wildhound Derby. I ran it at 50.00 a spin. Yet there was something enchanting about it that kept me sleepless that night — ok, not really, but that Golden Hare deciding when the dogs move definitely grabbed my attention. The bet panel offers 10.00, 20.00, 30.00, 40.00 and 50.00 as presets, with plus and minus controls beyond them. Visually, it certainly looks a bit dated.

Wildhound Derby is a 5-reel, 4-row slot with 30 fixed paylines. The lines are fixed, so the stake covers all thirty on every spin. Core to this slot is the Dog Race Free Spins feature, and the four Wild Dogs poised on reel 5 are of considerable importance as well. Wins pay left to right and only the highest win on a line is counted.

Wallpaper behind the dog track

Visually, it's flat, I have to say, and it looks tired and aged. The paytable screen prints the thirty lines as a numbered grid. The background is your typical wallpaper.

But dated graphics is not necessarily a deal breaker when it comes to slots. Time to examine Wildhound Derby properly. The 25,000.00 I started with finished at 20,405.00.

The trophy Wild and the ranks under it

The highest symbol is the trophy Wild. One of the frames I kept has three of them across the middle of reels 2, 3 and 4 for 100 credits, twice the stake. It grants you 5000 coins for 5 of a kind on a line, and wins are paid from left to right. The other frame is a race-ticket line paying 150 credits, three times the stake. Only the highest win per line is counted. The panel in both reads 50.00 a spin, with balances of 24,925.00 and 24,185.00.

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Wildhound Derby also contains four numbered Wild Dogs — Braveheart, Daring Dex, Beadles Teabag and Oh My Dog — and a Golden Hare. The Wild Dogs are wild in their own right and substitute for all other symbols. All of these come into play during the free spins feature, and I'll describe them in the relevant section below. That leaves the base game running on the trophy, the cash bundles, the rosette, the race tickets, the racing paper, the three-dog symbol and the card ranks.

The race ends when a dog passes reel 1

Wildhound Derby is all about the free spin feature. The two races paid 11,100.00 between them. That's the only part of the game where the big wins landed, as the base game is thin. My best base-game spin was 2,050.00 on spin 90, 41 times the stake.

The Dog Race Free Spins are triggered when the Wild Dogs assume their starting positions on reel 5, and it's here that the Golden Hare comes into play. There is no scatter count to collect; the arrival of the dogs on that reel is the whole trigger condition. You choose one of the four dogs. That choice decides only whether the Winner's Wheel is reached, since the round pays its spins either way. A dog shifts one reel to the left for every Golden Hare that lands on its row, winning the race once it advances past reel 1. From reel 5 that is five moves, each of them requiring a hare on the dog's own row.

The feature concludes when one of the Wild Dogs wins the race. Any of the four crossing the line ends it, not only the one you backed. So there is no set number of free spins listed anywhere. How long a round runs depends entirely on how the hares land. If the dog you chose is the one that crosses the line, the Winner's Wheel is granted, multiplying the total winnings by anything from x2 up to x15. The wheel applies to the round's total, so it comes after the spins have finished rather than during them.

The Minty Breakdown: Both races landed inside a 40-spin window and paid 11,100 credits between them, 57% of everything the session won, against 399 spins that returned nothing. Play'n GO's other thirty-line builds, Legacy of Egypt and Game of Gladiators Uprising, stop at 5,000x and 6,000x the stake where this one is set at 15,000x.

Two races in 480 spins

It's a bit convoluted, as you could probably tell from reading the review, although it should be noted that it makes more sense when actually playing it. My two races arrived on spins 288 and 326, 38 spins apart.

The bonus is capable of throwing a punch. The first took the balance from 16,690.00, the lowest point of the session, to 23,590.00. Mine delivered 139 times the stake the first time and 83 times the second, 57% of everything I won across 480 spins. The second paid 4,150.00 from the feature, with another 30.00 from the base game on the same spin. Moreover, the limited paylines on the 4-row reel set gives a lot of dead spins and meagre payouts, making the base game slow. The longest I went without a win of any size was 20 spins, ending on spin 347. Only 81 of my 480 spins paid anything at all, and 40 of those paid less than the stake. My peak balance came one spin after the second race, 26,260.00 on spin 327. The race itself is the opposite of repetitive. Each one runs until a dog gets past reel 1, so no two of them are the same length. That's largely because it appears so seldom: twice in a session that finished at 80.9% of what I put in.