If you take a look at the reels for just ten seconds, you’ll see what is missing. Secret Garden includes none of the card ranks—no 10, no Jack, no Queen, no King, and no Ace. Eyecon has filled all 13 tiles with garden items, ranging from ladybirds and butterflies at the bottom of the sheet to a rainbow and a sun near the top, while a gold padlock and a red rose have been used for the special symbols.
Almost every 25-line game from this era strengthens its lower rows with playing cards; this one does so with daffodils. The artwork follows the same concept. You’ll see flat watercolour greens within a stone frame, dandelions drifting over the edge of the screen, and, below that, the simplest rule set that Eyecon has ever placed on a 5 by 3 grid. The demonstration shows you all of this.
The wild acts as a gold padlock, securing a position twice as valuable. It takes the place of every garden symbol except the rose, and any line that it helps to complete is paid out at double the amount. It is also the highest number on the sheet: when five padlocks appear in a row it gives 380 times the stake, as opposed to 38 times for five rainbows or five suns. The same tile serves as both a substitute and the best prize. When all 25 lines are in play, a single padlock can end up within several winning lines at the same time, and each of those lines is doubled.
The number of games triples: it applies whether Line wins, Rose wins, or it’s a win for the entire board, as long as the round is in progress. If three or more Red Roses appear anywhere on the board, you get 15 free games, and the count doesn’t go up if there are additional roses; both four and five roses give you the same 15 games. The only way for the round to increase is through retiggers, and this increase is capped at 15. The padlock keeps doubling within the feature, so a wild line during the free games is worth much more than the same line outside the feature. Nothing else can be unlocked. There is no pick screen, no meter, and no second bonus following the first.
The rose serves a dual purpose and its rewarding aspect is easily ignored. Generally, players only see it as a trigger and fail to realise that a pair of them has already covered the cost of the spin. Roses pay out from two, no matter where they land, and they do not require a line to do so, which is why five of them give a return of 450x — more than the padlock achieves. The game includes only the highest rose win among your line wins, so rose payouts never build on one another. Two pays 2x, three pays 5x, and four pays 20x. The robin, bluebird, dragonfly, ladybird and butterfly make the game as much an animal-themed slot as a flower-themed one.
If you turn off the paylines in this garden, the Red Rose will still pay out since scattered wins apply to all paylines. For all the other symbols, their paylines must be turned on before they can produce a win. All 25 lines can be selected rather than being fixed in place, and the information screen shows each pattern so that you can see which rows it covers. The line wins go from left to right starting at the leftmost reel and nothing pays in the opposite direction. If two lines win at the same time, both of them pay; but if only one line wins, it pays only on its best combination, so a five-symbol sequence does not also pay you for the three symbols inside it. Six of the thirteen symbols pay when two matching ones are found, which ensures that some payments continue even on short lines, and the padlock counts as one of those six and also doubles the amount it completes. The other six require three matching symbols before they will pay at all. Turning off the lines causes your stake to decrease along with them, but it also reduces the number of ways a garden symbol can reach you, and in either case the Red Rose is unaffected.
The return to player ratio is 95.436%, as specified in the game’s own rules. The rules do not state a maximum win and Eyecon also does not publish one for this game, so the highest single amount listed anywhere is the rose paying out at 450x when five land are landed, the free games then tripling all winnings just as they do with everything else. The retrigger limit is the game’s nearest equivalent to a limit: 15 retriggers, after which the round ends regardless of what is on the reels. Secret Garden gives the same figures to the decimal place as Temple of Iris, Shaman’s Dream and Happy Birthday, three other Eyecon 25-line games that use the same ladder, the same 15 free games and the same retrigger cap. If you understand one of them you have understood all four. The value of free play in this case is in observing how flat the middle of the sheet becomes once the rose has disappeared, and in a few rounds you will have seen the entire game since there is no more of it to see.
Begin at the middle of the ladder since it’s there that this paytable makes its point. The robin pays out 18 times when five instances appear, the dragonfly and the bluebird each pay 10 times, and the six tiles below them together have two sets of numbers between them. The mushroom and the tree offer payouts of 5 times, 1 time, and 0.4 times, followed by a more even 4 times for the sunflower, daffodil, butterfly, and ladybird. The only difference between those four is the way they look. The two ends are the ones that are most interesting. The padlock increases its payout from 0.4 times to 8 times to 80 times to 380 times as the number of symbols goes from two to five, representing the steepest rise in this entire paytable, and the rose is completely outside the line rules with payouts of 2 times, 5 times, 20 times, and 450 times.
| Symbol | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold Garden Lock (wild) | 0.4x | 8x | 80x | 380x |
| Red Rose (scatter) | 2x | 5x | 20x | 450x |
| Rainbow | 0.08x | 1x | 6x | 38x |
| Sun | 0.08x | 1x | 6x | 38x |
| Robin | 0.08x | 0.8x | 4x | 18x |
| Dragonfly | 0.08x | 0.4x | 3x | 10x |
| Bluebird | 0.08x | 0.4x | 3x | 10x |
| Mushroom | n/a | 0.4x | 1x | 5x |
| Tree | n/a | 0.4x | 1x | 5x |
| Sunflower | n/a | 0.2x | 0.8x | 4x |
| Daffodil | n/a | 0.2x | 0.8x | 4x |
| Butterfly | n/a | 0.2x | 0.6x | 4x |
| Ladybird | n/a | 0.2x | 0.6x | 4x |
Secret Garden is the simplest slot in Eyecon's classic range, built from one wild, one scatter, 15 tripled free games, and 13 garden symbols with no playing cards among them. That simplicity is also its flattest stretch, because six of those symbols pay near enough the same. Lovely to look at, thin to play.
The illustration resembles the inside cover of a children’s gardening book, with flat green colours, a stone border, and dandelions cover the screen. The artwork is achieving more than the mathematics that underlies it. If you take Secret Garden’s rules and apply them to this 2017 version, it has one wild, one scatter, one feature, and 13 symbols, making it the simplest item in Eyecon’s classic line and the easiest format to learn.
Plain cuts both ways. The middle section of the paytable is flat so that six symbols are effectively interchangeable, and between the roses there’s nothing that builds up, no meter filling in, no pick waiting to be opened. You’re spinning with the aim of getting a scatter count, and a return of 95.436% doesn’t really give you much patience for that. The 380x padlock line is the only number worth waiting for, and it requires five wild symbols to appear in the same line to achieve it.
The only genuine way to tell the four machines with the same paylines apart is by considering their appearance, and this one is the most pleasing of the four in that regard. Those who want a garden that changes can get the same theme with Thai Flower Megaways, which features a changing grid and a much more active screen.
In November 2018, Eyecon returned to the garden with Secret Garden 2, and a jackpot-enabled version is also available. These variations don’t alter the shape being examined here; they just add to it. This is the version with nothing on top.
