Gold Dust Pokie
It’s time to get diggin’ for treasures, as the Gold Dust video pokie from EGT is set in and around an old gold mine, where symbols of pickaxes, lanterns and prospectors line up across 5 reels to pay out some dynamite prizes. Talking of dynamite, there’s an explosive bonus round that leads to some big win multipliers, along with a rewarding free spins game, wild substitutions, a gamble round and if that’s not enough to blow players away, there’s even a 4-level progressive jackpot to go for.
It’s a classic 5-reel pokie, where the symbols are in 3 rows, while running from the left side, we have a total of 20 paylines. Standard wins come from identical symbols stopping across these lines on adjacent reels from the left, and the more reels covered, the higher the payouts.
It all plays out against a background of the desert, although the actual reels are just a plain black, which contrasts the colourful symbols that spin down them. Above the main part of the game, there’s 4 boxes, each connected to a playing card suit and each featuring a progressive jackpot value, while below is the control panel, and to the sides are the payline indicators.
Playing Gold Dust
Because all lines are fixed, the minimum stake is set at 0.20, although cautious punters may want to try the free Gold Dust video pokies offered by many online casinos. The details of what each symbol is worth can be found on the pay table, and the smaller, but consequently more frequent wins will come from the J, Q, K and A playing card symbols.
The pickaxe is worth 20, 50 or 1000 coins when stopping on 3, 4 or 5 reels of a payline, while the lantern and pan of gold will each pay out 20, 100 or 1000. The attractive female and handsome male gold miners top the table, paying as much as 1000 coins each, but it’s the image of the entrance to a gold mine that’s really going to strike riches, as it pays out anything from 20 to 10000 coins depending on how many reels it appears on.
This is also the wild symbol, able to act as any of the above if it can then either fill in the gaps in a winline or extend a win across further reels, or even both at once. There’s a couple of symbols that it won’t be able to substitute however, as these trigger the main Gold Dust bonus games.
Gold Dust
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Bonus Features
A classic American steam train is a scatter symbol, and any time 3 or more chug into position, players are prompted to click one of them to start a free spins game. The number of spins varies depending on how many scatters triggered the round and which scatter is chosen. If there were 3 train symbols, between 5 and 15 spins will play out, 4 of them awards between 8 and 18, and 5 scatters will result in between 10 and 20 extra games.
It’s full steam ahead in this round, as with each free spin an increasing win multiplier will be applied, starting at 1x and rising all the way up to the maximum of 50x for players who manage to retrigger the bonus games a couple of times over. Richer reels are used as well, so the winning odds are slightly improved.
Landing 3 bundles of dynamite take players deep into the mine where they will see more explosives and need to click the symbols to reveal multiplier amounts. The round continues through 4 levels until the Stop sign is found twice, whereupon any accumulated winnings are added up and paid out.
Other Features
In common with all EGT real money online pokies, Gold Dust has a gamble round where players can multiply wins by correctly picking that a playing card will be red or black, plus there’s the Jackpot Cards progressive feature which is linked to the 4 prizes displayed above the reels.
They need to click on 12 playing cards until 3 of the same suit have been found, when the progressive prize connected to that suit is awarded. While the lowest Club jackpot can be fairly small, the top Spade prize can be quite substantial.
The Verdict
The gold mining theme is quite a popular one, and appears across several casino pokie machines, but EGT have managed to stuff Gold Dust with so many features that it can blow away the competition. Free spins with potentially massive multipliers, a mini-game that has even more multiple payouts and the big rewards from landing the high-value symbols means that players won’t have to dig far to unearth the riches of Gold Dust.