-
About Cowboys Gold Slot
From Dead or Alive to Deadwood, wild west slots have always been a rich inspirational theme for slot studios. In fact, Pragmatic Play have had a love affair with the gold rush era of American history for some time now, so it’s no surprise that they have added another outlaw slot to their catalogue with Cowboy’s Gold, a late 2020 release that delivers a pretty straight-forward gameplay experience, but still offers up a decent top potential.
The action all takes place in a saloon bar, and on a reel-set adorned with all the classic iconography of the era, from horseshoes, pistols and holsters, to hanging ropes and moonshine bottles. It looks awesome and comes matched with an upbeat soundtrack. The reel grid is a classic 5×3 with 10 active fixed paylines in play at all times. To score wins you’ll need to land at least 3 matching symbols on one of the those paylines on the reels from left to right.
Spins start from just 10p per play.
RTP, Variance and Top Payout
The variance here is medium-high which means that the distribution of wins won’t be too even – you can expect some sessions with little or no return at all before a short gold rush of returns. So, if you are looking for casual slots play with a regular balanced win model, you might want to look elsewhere right now. The RTP is set to 96.5% which is pretty average and your maximum payout is 6,065x which would be possible only with an extremely rare combination of free spins and multipliers.
Symbols and Paytable
There are four royals on the reels which represent the low value symbols. The Jack and Queen will get you 2.5x stake for five of a kind, whilst Ace and King deliver 5x bet for the maximum combination of 5 on a winline. The Premium symbols with the highest values include the Pistol, Whisky, and a Spur, paying 50x or 20x for the maximum combination. The cowboy icons themselves can all form winlines together and deliver up to 10x for five on a payline. And the Golden Horseshoe is the highest-paying premium symbol, and five of them on a line will get you 75x bet.
Look out as well for the Sheriff’s Badge which is the Wild that substitutes for all icons apart from the Skull Bonus Scatter, which is required to trigger the free spins round.Â
Gameplay and Features
Cowboy Gold is pretty pared down when it comes to features. Some of us like that with our high variance slots but if you are looking for a feature-packed monster slot like the best Megaways™ then this won’t be for you. There are just two features in-play and they work like this:
Money Collect Feature
When the Cowboy Icons land on the reels, sometimes they will carry numbers with them, overlaid on the symbol. These numbers represent multipliers from 1x to 100x your stake. More than one Cowboy can appear on the reels at the same time, each carrying a multiplier. If you are lucky enough to land a Renegade icon on reel 5 at the same time as you have Cowboys with multipliers on them, you will collect all values on ALL the Cowboys and pocket a neat payout. This can happen in both the base game and the bonus round.
Free Spins Feature
The Scary Skeleton wearing a uniform is the Scatter that triggers the Free Spins feature.
You need to land three of them on the three central reels in order to trigger free spins. The round starts with 10 free spins. It is possible to trigger additional free spins by landing 3 more scatters on a single spin. Now, each time this happens 5 more spins are added to the total, and new multipliers come into play. The first re-trigger earns a 2x multiplier, the second re-trigger earns a 3x multiplier, and the third re-trigger earns a 5x multiplier.
The multipliers are also applied to any Money Collect feature wins triggered during the bonus round.
Our VerdictÂ
Cowboys Gold will not be winning any awards when it takes its place in the pantheon of wild west slots – we’ve seen much of what is on display here before and there is nothing outstanding in either the payouts or the features to lift it up above the competition in an already crowded pool of games. But nevertheless, it still looks good and the combo of Money Collects and Free Spins re-triggers combining with multipliers has the potential to drive some tasty win sequences and keep things interesting. Pragmatic fans will be pleased with the result, as will some high variance purists. For the rest though, we suspect this is a bit of an also-ran.
