Volatile Slot

Golden Rock Studios, a newer developer working with Microgaming, set Volatile Slot against a South Pacific shoreline, with palms and beach in the foreground and a smoking volcano far behind the reels. The grid has five reels and three rows with 10 paylines, and stakes run from 0.10 to 100 per spin. A strip above the reels shows a different short message after each spin.

The symbol set is small. Card ranks from 10 to A pay for three or more matching symbols on a line. Four themed symbols complete the paytable: drums, a flame, a shrine and an island woman. These need only two matching symbols to pay, and the woman is the richest, returning 40 times the stake.

Two kinds of wild drive the game. Volcanic Wilds land on reels 2, 3 and 4 and stand in for every other symbol. Any of them can randomly turn into an Exploding Wild, which still substitutes but also detonates for a multiplier of x2, x3 or x4. Several Exploding Wilds in one win have their multipliers multiplied together, and with the limit of three on the grid, that product reaches x64.

Having three wilds visible at once triggers 10 free spins. The same rules as the base game apply, and extra spins can be won by retriggering. What changes is the reel set, which carries more Volcanic and Exploding Wilds than the main game does.

Volatility is high and the return to player is 96.1%. The top prize is 25,600x the stake. Stakes start at a dime and rise to 100 per spin, and the message strip above the grid changes with every spin.