10 Swords

Ancient Rome supplies the backdrop for Push Gaming's 10 Swords, staged across a columned set that shifts from daylight in the base game to night-time once the bonus round begins. The studio pitches this one at a gentler volatility than usual for its catalogue, landing at low-to-medium overall.

Three separate ways to bet run alongside each other in 10 Swords: a standard stake between 0.10 and 100 per spin returning 96.41%, an Ante Bet that raises the wager by 20% in exchange for better odds of collecting the Shield symbols needed for free spins and lifts the return to 96.45%, and a direct bonus purchase for 50x the stake that pushes the return higher still, to 96.75%.

The reels run 5 across and 3 down, paying out over 20 fixed lines. Face cards from Jack through Ace form the bottom tier of the paytable, three character symbols top it, and a trio of Roman-flavoured props — a helmet, a drinking vessel and a horn — fill the middle. Five-of-a-kind wins pay 4x the stake for the card values, climb to 10x-15x for the mid-tier props, and reach 30x-40x for the characters. An Eagle wild covers every regular symbol and is worth up to 40x the stake across a full five-symbol line of its own.

Sword symbols can land on any reel in either the base game or the bonus round, and simply having four or more visible on the grid at once pays an instant prize regardless of payline position. Ten Sword symbols in view is worth 5,000x the stake, nine pays 1,000x, eight pays 100x, seven pays 25x, six pays 10x, five pays 5x, and four — the minimum needed — pays 2x.

The Shield symbol is what triggers the bonus. Three Shields are enough to start the round, worth 8 free spins on their own. A fourth Shield lifts that to 10 spins and turns two of the low-pay symbols into Swords right away, while landing all five pushes the total to 12 spins and converts four low-pay symbols at once. Inside the round, further Shields feed a meter attached to whichever low symbols remain untouched, and completing that meter turns another low symbol into a permanent Sword for the rest of the feature — worth four extra spins for the first conversion, three for the second, and two for the fourth.

10 Swords caps its win potential at 5,000x the stake, and because Sword-symbol prizes can land in the base game as well as the bonus round, meaningful money isn't reserved entirely for the free spins — a detail that keeps the pace livelier than the low-to-medium volatility rating might otherwise suggest.