Mystery symbols land face down. They fill their positions on the grid as blank or masked icons, concealing whatever they’ll become until the reels have settled. Then they flip, all at once, revealing the same symbol across every position they occupy. When several mystery symbols land on the same spin, that simultaneous reveal can instantly reshape the entire grid. The feature is designed around that moment of transformation, and whether it delivers depends entirely on which symbol sits beneath the mask.
The reveal is always the same symbol across all mystery positions on a given spin, which is what gives the feature its potential. A single mystery symbol revealing as a low-value icon is unremarkable. Six mystery symbols covering two full reels and revealing as the game’s highest-paying regular symbol is a different outcome entirely. The symbol chosen for each reveal is determined randomly at the point of landing, with different games weighting the symbol pool differently. Some allow any regular symbol to appear, others exclude the lowest-value icons to keep the reveal consistently meaningful. Mystery symbols typically cannot reveal as wilds or scatters, though a small number of titles make exceptions.
Yes, in every standard implementation. All mystery symbols that land in a single spin share the same reveal, which is the core logic that makes the feature work. If they each revealed independently as random symbols, the feature would function like a standard random symbol placement with no distinguishing quality. The shared reveal is what creates the possibility of multiple matching positions appearing simultaneously across the grid from a single spin.
It depends on whether the game allows mystery symbols to reveal as scatter symbols. Most titles keep scatters outside the mystery symbol pool entirely, so a mystery symbol cannot reveal as a scatter and cannot contribute to a bonus trigger. In the games where that restriction applies, mystery symbols affect only regular play wins rather than bonus access. The paytable will specify which symbols are and aren’t available as mystery reveals.