The Gunman of Goldwood Demo: 750 Spins With No Bonus, Then Three Buys

750 paid spins and never more than two bells

We expected to write about free spins. Instead our log of 750 paid spins, each at €1.00 in the official demo, records the base game alone: €750.00 staked, €521.50 returned, 69.5%, well short of the listed 94.31%.

• 750paid spins at €1.00 in the demo
• 69.5%of the stakes paid back
• 36xbest single spin
• 0free spins rounds triggered

A winning spin came 19.2% of the time, and wins were rarely tiny: only 23 of the 144 paid less than the stake, and the median was 1.5x. The gaps between them were the problem. The longest lasted 20 spins, and 14 wins reached 10x with none past 36x.

Not once did the running total climb back to the €5,000.00 we began with. Its peak, €4,999.00, came after spin 1, and it closed at its low, €4,771.50. Scatter bells showed up one at a time on 198 spins and in pairs on 8. A third never joined them. Our filming session added 80 more paid spins at the same stake before we bought the round, and they brought no bonus either; the best of them paid 20.00, on its fourth spin.

Crosshairs first, then a reel full of the same symbol

What kept the session alive was the Duel. The rules say it can trigger at random in the base game; every symbol in a winning combination then expands to cover its whole reel, one after another, and pays only once expanded. A Wild can expand more than once if it sits in wins with different symbols.

That spin paid 5.00. Covering a reel from top to bottom is the point of the Duel: every line runs through every reel, so once the queens fill reels 1 to 3, all 10 lines carry three of them. Each Duel that paid in our log paid on all 10 lines.

Two gunmen pay 1.00 on a line at our stake, so that pair became 10.00. By our reading of the server's answers to our 750 logged spins, the Duel fired 32 times, about once in 23 spins. Only 15 of those had a winning combination to expand, yet they paid €236.00, 45.3% of everything we got back, and 12 of our 14 wins of 10x or more.

Bull-skull Wilds that double a line, then double it again

The Wild, a red W with a bull's skull, stands in for everything except the Scatter and multiplies any line it joins. The rules give x2 for one Wild on a line, x4 for two, x8 for three and x16 for four.

The doubling rarely got far. In our base game Wilds landed on reels 2 to 5, never on reel 1, and lines that used one outside a Duel turned up on 36 spins, which paid €136.00 in all. Only 5 spins had a line at x4, and nothing went higher. Spin 259, our best at 36x, was one of them: Wilds on reels 3 and 4 sat on two lines of the same symbol, which paid 12.00 on the four-symbol line and 24.00 on the five-symbol one.

Wilds can also sit inside a Duel. On four of the paying ones a Wild was part of the expanded combination, so every line doubled: on spin 169 ten lines worth 1.00 each came to 20.00.

Three bought Bonus Games at 110x each

Three, four or five bells give 8, 12 or 16 free spins, and the same counts retrigger them. Inside, a Random Wild lands somewhere on reels 2, 3 or 4 at the start of each free spin, and the Duel is always active, so every winning combination expands.

For the camera we bought the round. Three bells landed, on reels 1, 2 and 5, and 8 free spins began. The first four paid nothing. The fifth did the rest.

With two Wilds on every line, each K line was multiplied by at least four, and the spin paid €122.00. The last three free spins added nothing, so the round returned 122x the stake for a 110x price.

Before filming we had made two control purchases at the same price, logged separately: they returned €222.00 and €10.00, and neither retriggered. Three rounds for €330.00 brought back €354.00, which says more about how far apart single rounds land than about the buy's long-run value.

The game page and the rules screen list 94.31%, and that is the version the demo plays. Casinos may run another one; in markets that ban feature buys, there is no button to press.

A base game that leans on Duels, set against three relatives

Kraken's Lair has the nearest thing to a Duel on this site: its Expanding Wins make the symbols of a winning line with the Kraken Emblem grow to fill their reels. That game has 9 paylines, no buy and a listed 96.12%.

For wild multipliers, Midas Golden Touch doubles every line a wild joins on 15 paylines, at 96.17% with a 10,100x cap.

Sword of Khans shares the 10 paylines and charges 80x for its bonus. Of our other logs, only 5 returned less than this one, its 55.9% among them.

The case for The Gunman of Goldwood rests on the Duel, a base-game feature that can turn a one-line win into one on every line. The case against is in the numbers: a lower listed RTP than all three relatives, a 7,500x cap below theirs, and a bonus that never arrived in 750 spins. Players who want free spins to come round reliably should look elsewhere; anyone content to wait for a paying Duel, roughly one spin in 50 for us, will see the game at its liveliest without buying anything.

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Short answers on bells, Duels and wild multipliers

Four quick ones, settled by the rules screens, our filming session and the server's answers to our 750 logged spins.