Reel five carries no low symbols, and every symbol landing on it counts as two. The other four use 2-3-3-3-1 rows for 108 ways. Then, xRIP takes its cut. Any spin whose total pay falls below the stake is voided, so only 9.08% of spins in this Wild West slot pay anything. Dusty frontier comedy on top, no humour underneath.
xRIP is the rule the splash screen leads with, and it holds in standard play and both free-spin modes. A spin whose combinations add up to less than the stake pays nothing. The fifth reel trades frequency for size. No low symbols reach it, its symbol counts as two, and Boothill Freespins leaves only the five Cowboys on it.
Regular Wilds land on reels 2 to 5, worth x1 to the free-spin multiplier. The Reel Split Wild, worth x2, lands on the middle three reels and splits itself and its neighbours in half. The xSplit Wild appears on the last reel, two symbols high, and cuts one of four random paths to the left, doubling every symbol along it, an xNudge Wild’s multiplier included. The xNudge Wild nudges until its stack is fully shown, adding x1 per step, and Wild multipliers add together.
Three Hang ’em High Scatters on the middle reels open 8 spins; two on their own convert into Reel Split Wilds. The win multiplier then climbs as Wilds land, by x1 for a regular Wild, x2 for a Reel Split or xSplit Wild, and x1 to x3 for an xNudge Wild, and it holds to the final spin. A Boothill Scatter on reel five upgrades the round, with 2 more spins.
Three Scatters plus a Boothill Scatter open the deeper mode, 10 spins with the last reel cut back to the five Cowboys. The Cowboy landing there turns every symbol of that type Wild, and each spin draws a multiplier for one random Cowboy from a fixed set of twenty values, 5 to 999, added to whatever the Wilds have stacked. Without the trigger, a Boothill Scatter respins reel five into a Cowboy that turns Wild everywhere with x5 to x999.
Enhanced Bet, the studio’s xBet setting, costs 1.1x the stake and guarantees a Scatter on reel two, harsher standard play in exchange for a better run at the features. Nolimit City prices its buys at 70x for Hang ’em High Freespins and 3,000x for Boothill Freespins. Released in January 2022, it remains one of the coldest starts in the Nolimit City catalogue.
Two rows on reel one, three on each of the middle reels, and one position on reel five reads as 54 ways. The game offers 108, because that last symbol always counts as two. A run of matching symbols counts from reel one across neighbouring reels, and its pay is the symbol value taken once per way it occupies, best combination per way. The splitting Wilds take the count well past 108 when they land, since a Reel Split Wild doubles a whole reel and the xSplit Wild doubles a whole path. Different reel sets run in the main game and in each of the bonus modes. For the register, this is one of the meaner entries on the Wild West shelf.
The grid opens at €0.10 and closes at €50. Free play uses the 96.08% RTP setting, and Enhanced Bet at 1.1x the stake reads 96.28% instead. El Gordo’s Revenge is the name of the game’s cap. When a round’s total win reaches 300,000x the stake, the round stops and pays that amount, an outcome the game models as occurring in 1 in 130,000,000 rounds.
El Gordo, the best of the five Cowboys, pays 4x for five, the other four Cowboys drop from 3x to 1x, and the card ranks finish between 0.5x and 0.9x. Nothing on this table is built to carry a round on its own.
| Symbol | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Gordo | 0.5x | 0.8x | 4x |
| Edda Star | 0.4x | 0.6x | 3x |
| Skinny Joe | 0.4x | 0.5x | 2.5x |
| Fourth Cowboy | 0.3x | 0.4x | 1.5x |
| Fifth Cowboy | 0.3x | 0.4x | 1x |
| A | 0.2x | 0.3x | 0.9x |
| K | 0.2x | 0.3x | 0.8x |
| Q | 0.1x | 0.2x | 0.7x |
| J | 0.1x | 0.2x | 0.6x |
| 10 | 0.1x | 0.2x | 0.5x |
A symbol on reel five counts twice in each of those combinations, which is why the total ways double. None of the Wilds or Scatters appears in the table.
Tombstone R.I.P is a design with one idea and the nerve to follow it. xRIP removes every win smaller than the stake, the fifth reel doubles whatever survives, and the two free-spin modes turn Wilds into a multiplier that holds to the last spin. That leaves a 9.08% hit rate and long, dry stretches between features, which will not suit everyone. A lower 94.08% build of the game also exists, so the 96.08% in free play is the better of the two. It rates 4.4/5 for exactly that.
How long is the wait on a game that voids its own small wins? That is the first question this review has to answer, and the number is 9.08%, roughly one paying spin in eleven. xRIP is the cause. Anything worth less than the stake is deleted before it reaches you, so the near-nothing wins that make a ways game feel busy have been designed out.
The return is built to match, with a larger share loaded into the two free-spin modes rather than standard play, so the base game is the wait and the modes are the pay.
Boothill Freespins is where the design pays for itself, and its multiplier set shows how. Eight of the twenty values are between 5 and 12, five are 300, and only one reads 999. Every draw adds to the multiplier the Wilds have already stacked, so the small values still count. A x6 on top of an x8 built from nudges is a different sum from a x6 on its own.
This is the game Nolimit City invented the word Insane for, and the frontier art plays it straight, wanted posters and a graveyard sign, with none of the chaos the numbers promise. San Quentin 2: Death Row occupies the same corner of the studio’s range.
Nine paying spins in a hundred is a real cost, and 8 spins of Hang ’em High will not always repay it. What the design buys for that cost is a last reel that doubles whatever it touches, plus a multiplier that never resets within a feature.
