Wheel O’Gold

‘Sprawling meadows’, an ‘overarching rainbow’, symbols that include four-leaf clovers and horseshoes, it can only be another leprechaun-themed slot bounding over the hills towards us, surely? And so it is in Pragmatic Play’s online slot Wheel O’Gold. For this game, Pragmatic Play has used the opportunity to once again give players some scatter-paying action, a mechanic the studio has fallen head over heels for of late, as has much of the online gambling industry. You might be tempted to think Wheel O’Gold is a Gates of Olympus 1000 clone dressed up in a top hat and buckled shoes, but while there are similarities, Wheel O’Gold uses a different method for adding and building those all-important multipliers.

An absolutely textbook, classic, pleasantly generic vision of leprechaun gaming greets players once Wheel O’Gold loads. Clovers line the bottom of the screen before transitioning into lush green meadows, mountains, and a rainbow-adorned sky. A leprechaun fellow, all big smile and bushy beard bobs up and down beside the gaming grid, meaning the visual layout follows in Gates’ footsteps. Wheel O’Gold is a leprechaun game, alright; not much more to add than that.

Wheel O’Gold is also a highly volatile slot (carrying a 5 out of 5 rating), available in several RTP settings, with 96.02% being the highest. At least, this is the value created when betting 20 c to $/€240 per spin as normal and when using the ante bet. With the ante bet activated, more scatter symbols are present on the reels, though players pay an extra 25% for the privilege.

Set within a golden patterned frame is Wheel O’Gold’s 6-reel, 5-row gaming grid, using a scatter-paying mechanism to create wins. How it works is that instead of ways or paylines, when at least 8 identical pay symbols land on the board in any position, they create a winning scatter. After a scatter win has paid out, the winning symbols involved in it explode from the reels, making spaces on the grid. Symbols drop down to plug the spaces and provide a new chance to win. Sequences of tumble wins end when no new scatter win is created after a tumble. As to the pay symbols, they include blue, purple, pink, and red gems as the low pays, then a gold clover, a pipe, a mug of beer, a horseshoe, and a top hat as the high pays. For landing 8-9 matching symbols, the resulting payout is 0.2 to 4 times the bet, while at the upper end, 1 to 25 times the bet is paid for hitting 12+ of a kind. No wilds land in Wheel O’Gold.

Wheel O’Gold: Slot Features

When listed, Wheel O’Gold’s features – tumbles, multipliers, free spins, and bonus buys, sounds the same as a good number of Pragmatic Play’s scatter paying slots, but the trick here is how the multipliers appear and how they may be increased.

Multiplier Feature

In the base game, when 5 consecutive tumbles happen on the same spin after the fifth spin, a wheel covered in multipliers appears. One multiplier is randomly selected and is used to multiply all subsequent wins from the spin. Possible multiplier values are x2 to x50.

Free Spins

Hitting 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols in the base game awards 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. At the start of the free spins phase, the wheel appears to award a random multiplier. This multiplier applies to all wins during the round. Whenever a scatter symbol lands, it is collected by a meter. For every 4 collected scatter symbols, +4 free spins are added to the remaining amount, and the wheel spins again, adding its new multiplier to the existing multiplier until the end of the round.

Buy Free Spins

Players may buy the free spins round from the base game for 100 times the total bet. When buying free spins like this, 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols randomly hit to trigger it, and the RTP is 95.94%.

Wheel O’Gold: Slot Verdict

Ever wonder if there is a set-aside department at Pragmatic Play’s HQ that is solely dedicated to crafting new scatter-paying slots? Imagine the team that came up with Gates of Olympus, who did such a good job their employer has tasked them from now till the end of time with squeezing, cajoling, and massaging out new ways of delivering scatter wins with multipliers mixed in. Wheel O’Gold’s a bit different, to be sure. Instead of relying on multiplier symbols to drop from the sky onto the board, you need a solid run of consecutive tumble wins or free spin scatter symbols to get the wheel a-spinning. Is it better this way, or is it worse? Neither method is a clear-cut winner over the other. Let’s just say they’re different, and players get an extra choice if more choices were really needed or not.

An interesting quirk about Wheel O’Gold is that the multiplier values on its wheel are a lot less impressive than those found in Gates of Olympus-style slots. Here, the biggest is x50; there, they generally go up to x500. The multiplier can stack in free spins via the scatter symbol collection process, but it doesn’t feel as impressive. However, this intuitive impression is crushed by the weight of Wheel O’Gold’s winning potential, as its 10,000x the bet win cap is double what’s possible in Gates of Olympus. So, if a blast of good luck is flowing through Wheel O’Gold, it’s as capable of turning up a sizable pot of gold at the end of a rainbow as just about any other scatter-paying slot Pragmatic Play has made.

Another thing about Wheel O’Gold, which might appeal to scatter-paying enthusiasts, is that the multiplier system is simpler. For instance, when you start free spins, you get a multiplier at the beginning, and it applies to every win from there on out. There is no need to land a multiplier symbol at the same time as a win to benefit from the round’s total multiplier. From a technical perspective, Wheel O’Gold has something somewhat innovative for scatter-paying cork sniffers to play around with, though the generic theme might dampen the impressions of originality.