Golden Scrolls

So I gave Golden Scrolls a proper go over a few evenings. It's an Ancient Egypt slot by Slotmill, running on a 5-reel, 6-row grid with 20 paylines. Bets go from 20p up to 80 quid. Looks wise, it's quite understated -- big stone pillars with hieroglyphs either side, pyramids in the background, and this moody snake-charmer tune playing. Not the flashiest Egypt slot I've seen but it's got a nice weight to it, feels solid rather than over the top.

Lower end of the paytable is your standard J, Q, K, A royals -- five of a kind pays around 4 to 4.5x your bet, so nothing wild there. Then you've got mid-tier Egyptian bits like the Eye of Horus, Ankh Cross, and a triangle-eye symbol paying 7x to 12x for five. The top payers are character symbols -- a cat, dog, and bird -- worth 14x to 20x for a full line.

The real stars though are three different wild scrolls. Regular blue wild just subs in. The Expanding Wild drops downward filling positions below it, picking up a multiplier that grows by 1 per position, maxing at 6x. Then the Golden Expanding Wild covers the entire reel automatically and always carries that juicy 6x multiplier. Multiple wilds on a win? Their multipliers get added together.

Three scarab scatters in the base game get you 8 free spins, and wilds appear more often during the round. Land a +1 Spin symbol and you extend the feature. The big deal is Super Free Spins -- either triggered by getting 2 scatters plus a Super Bonus scatter from the base, or by landing the Super Bonus during regular free spins, which upgrades your remaining spins. In Super Free Spins, every single wild becomes a Golden Expanding Wild. That is where the money is, genuinely.

There's also a Fast Track buy menu if you're impatient like me. 20x bet gets 3 guaranteed wilds, 60x gets 5, 100x buys free spins, and 400x goes straight to Super Free Spins. The bought features bump the RTP above 96%, which is decent considering the base game sits at 95.20%. Worth knowing before you start clicking buttons.

Base RTP is 95.20%, which is a touch below average if I'm honest. Volatility is high -- Slotmill actually call it 'very high' -- and the max win sits at 12,000x your bet. Free spins trigger roughly once every 227 spins on average. The odds of actually hitting that 12,000x top payout? About 1 in 3.28 million spins. So yeah, don't hold your breath, but the potential is there.

Honestly, Golden Scrolls is a decent session slot if you like expanding wilds and don't need your Egypt game to reinvent the wheel. The Super Free Spins round is properly exciting when it hits. My only gripe is the 6 rows with just 20 paylines -- sometimes an expanded wild sits there looking gorgeous and the matching symbols are just out of reach. A bit frustrating. But when things connect, especially with multiple Golden Expanding Wilds, the results can be brilliant. Solid, not spectacular, but I'd play it again.