Most six-reel grids stack up in a tidy block. Rolling in Gold slot fans out instead, 3 rows on reels 1 and 2 and 4 on the rest, an uneven wall of rock worth 2,304 ways to win. Behind it a bearded miner works a seam of gems and gold, and the sticks of dynamite that stand in for wilds only ever land on the two reels nearest him. That is where the game cracks open.
A bundle of red dynamite is the wild, and it turns up on reels 1 and 2 only. It stands in for every symbol but the two scatters, filling wins across the ways beside the top-paying miner, the gold cart, the money bags and the coloured gems. The wild never reaches reels 3 to 6, so a big line always grows from the left and works inward.
Two symbols sit outside the normal paytable. The money symbol is a gold nugget printed with a cash value, and it drops onto reels 3 to 6, adding that figure on top of whatever the reels award. The diamond is the other scatter. On the base reels it does nothing by itself, and its job arrives later, once the bonus is running.
Now and then a lit charge lands as a mystery symbol. Once it settles, it detonates, and every mystery symbol on the grid becomes one ordinary symbol. That can be anything but the wild, the diamond and the money symbol. Land a full board and a dead-looking spin can turn into a run of matching mules or gems.
Get a dynamite wild on each of reels 1 and 2 with a money symbol on reel 3, and the rock opens into Gold Spins, a hold-and-win round. The money symbols that triggered it lock in place, and you get 3 spins to add more. Each fresh money symbol resets the count to 3, so the round runs on as long as the nuggets keep coming. It ends once 3 spins pass with nothing new, or the grid fills, and you collect every amount displayed.
Diamonds turn Gold Spins into more than a nugget hunt. Any diamond you land in the round is banked, and each one earns a Super Spin, played once Gold Spins end. They swap the held grid for a diamond-only round, and every prize in view pays on every spin. A multiplier of x2, x3, x4, x5 or x10 sits over reels 1 and 2, raising the values that land under it. Collect more diamonds and more of those spins carry through.
Matching symbols pay wherever they land and on adjoining reels, with no fixed lines to follow, just one symbol repeating from the opening reel across. The odd row heights are the point of the layout, opening far more winning paths than a square grid would. Only the best win on a run counts, though separate wins on a spin add together, and the money symbols pay on top of it too.
A spin costs between 0.10 and 40.00, and the numbers on the reels read as multiples of that stake. The return shifts with the operator, and the free play demo we played ran one of the lower builds, so it depends on the casino. Volatility sits above medium, which suits a game whose real weight lands in a bonus you have to earn. There is no turbo, but a repeat press of spin settles the reels at once.
The miner tops the standard symbols, then the gold cart, then a shared tier of the money bag and mule, the lantern and helmet, and the gems at the bottom. These are multiples of your stake, for 6, 5, 4 and 3 of one symbol.
| Symbol | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miner | 15x | 10x | 5x | 1x |
| Gold cart | 5x | 2x | 1x | 0.6x |
| Money bag / Mule | 2.5x | 1.5x | 1x | 0.5x |
| Lantern / Helmet | 2x | 1x | 0.6x | 0.4x |
| Red / Orange / Blue gem | 1x | 0.6x | 0.4x | 0.2x |
Each nugget money symbol carries its own printed sum, so one of them can outpay a full run of gems.
Rolling in Gold belongs to the crowded genre of hold-and-win miners, but it reaches past where most of them stop. It does not end at the hold-and-win round; a strong one feeds a second, multiplied stage, and a 50,000x ceiling sits over the lot. On the demo build the return sits below par, and with no feature buy, that stage can be a long time coming.
The Mystery Symbol can flip a whole board to one paying symbol, a proper jolt among the standard spins, and the uneven grid, the shouting miner and the twangy bluegrass give it a warmth the format often skips. It is a game with a look and a soundtrack that stay on theme without pushing too hard.
Getting to the bonus takes a long sit, and there is no buy to skip the wait. It leans harder still on the diamonds, because a Gold Spins round that turns up none opens no Super Spins at all.
Two bonus rounds drive Rolling in Gold, and the game runs back to front, the smaller one feeding the bigger. Gold Spins is the hold-and-win most of these miners settle for, whilst Super Spins is the larger round it can unlock.
Take Super Spins first, because it is the reason to bother. Every value on the grid is awarded on every spin, and a multiplier over reels 1 and 2 decides the scale. Ours rolled past x5 and settled on x2, the low end, and even that turned a 47.00 board into a 73.20 the game flagged as a Mega Win. A x5 or x10 with more diamonds behind it is a different game again.
You only get there through Gold Spins, and the trick is that its real currency is diamonds, not gold. The nuggets hold in place and pay their pile, ours came to 47.00, but a round that banks no diamonds ends right there. We came away with a single one, which on most collectors would be the whole story.
Under both rounds is a plain-enough miner. Wilds stay penned to reels 1 and 2, the money symbols build on reels 3 to 6, and our best of the review on the flat reels reached 16.40 when a couple of nuggets stacked with the dynamite. The Mystery Symbol sits on top of it, a cluster of charges that lands and detonates, flipping every one to a single shared symbol.
What gives Rolling in Gold its own shape is that fork. A Gold Spins round can stop at a pile of nuggets, or a diamond can carry it into a multiplied finish. The diamonds are the point, the part that separates a routine collector from one with a proper payoff at the end.
