Lucky Tree Pokies
Players looking for peace and serenity should take a look at Bally Technologies’ Lucky Tree pokie, as it’s filled with calming images from an Oriental garden. They shouldn’t get too relaxed though, as they might miss out on a string of bonus features including free spins, multipliers and random wilds that make this a feature-filled game.
While Oriental garden themed pokies may be commonplace, this one looks a little different, with subtle pinks and purples being the dominant colours, and the attention to detail placed in each symbol is exceptional, with everything looking highly realistic or very stylised depending on the symbol in question.
Behind the reels is a beautiful image of the garden, with golden trees in blossom and mountains in the distance, while the actual reels are set in an ornate gold framework with lucky coins raining down on to them. It’s highly effective and grabs the attention of anyone looking through a list of pokies at their favourite online casinos.
A stroll through this peaceful garden should reveal its secrets and how to uncover them, so let’s take a trip to the Orient and see how it all works.
Playing Lucky Tree
This is a conventional 5 reel pokie with symbols arranged in 3 rows and 30 fixed paylines, which makes the minimum stake 0.30 and players can adjust their bet sizes up from there.
Wins occur when at least 3 or the same symbol type stop on a line running from the left side, on adjacent reels, although scatter wins can be in any positions as long as 3 or more of them are visible at once. Like many pokies, the smaller wins will come from the playing card symbols J, Q, K and A, with bigger rewards when the unique picture symbols appear.
These include the sorts of things that would be expected in a Far Eastern garden, such as bamboo and a pink flower, along with decorative statues of a frog, fish and turtle.
Lucky Tree
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Bonus Features
So far, so conventional, but unlike most pokies, instead of a single wild symbol, this one comes with 4 different ones, namely a dragon, cat, the ying/yang symbol and a lucky coin. These are all attractive in their own right and even more attractive when they replace any of the regular symbols to help complete winning lines, although they can’t substitute for each other.
To make it even more unusual, the ying/yang and cat are also scatter symbols which trigger their own bonus rounds whenever they stop in at least 3 positions.
Landing the ying/yang sees players awarded 10 free spins and to make them a little more interesting there’s extra lucky coin wilds added to the reels throughout them, while seeing 3 more ying/yang scatters will add a further 10 spins to the end of any still left to play out.
The cute cat will take players to a second bonus game when it works as a scatter symbol, although it will need to be on reels 1, 3 and 5 to do so. In this somewhat over-complicated round, players pick from 3 spheres which in turn awards them between 6 and 15 further picks in a second stage.
In this stage, the aim is to unveil matching pairs of prizes and once all the selections have been made, the amounts are added up and paid out.
Those lucky coins above the reels can become significant in the wild coin bonus, which occurs at random and simply consists of up to 7 extra wilds being added to the reels for a nice win.
The Verdict
While some people may take one look at Lucky Tree and think to themselves that’s it’s just another Oriental garden-themed pokie, they should really stop and take a closer look. The basic design may be a little over-used, but been it’s done in style and looks fantastic, however, the real attraction isn’t the way it looks but rather the way it plays.
The bonus features can be triggered quite easily, but even in the normal run of play, having 4 wilds on the reels should see plenty of wins coming from symbols being substituted by them. The free spins with extra wilds are a nice treat and while the pick a prize round may be played over too many levels, it’s still relatively short and I’ve only mentioned it as it’s one of the few downsides to this game.
Top this off with the chance for some random wild coins as well as the fair play and reliability that comes with all Bally pokies, and you have a high-quality game that should appeal even to players who thought they had seen it all with the whole garden theme.