Chain Mail Pokies
Join the King and his royal court for a feast of junk food in the Chain Mail pokie from Microgaming. With images of knights and castles, fried chicken and kebabs, letter boxes and mail bags, this game may have an unusual fusion of themes, but it’s certainly entertaining and has bonus features like wild multipliers, scatter wins and a side game with big rewards hidden behind the doors of the castle.
Chain Mail is a 5-reel game that comes with 20 paylines, while the symbols are laid out in 3 rows, so there’s nothing in the layout that players won’t be familiar with. It’s a bright, colourful Poker machine with the fun cartoon style that Microgaming have used across many of their most popular titles.
Lower the Drawbridge to the Reels of Chain Mail
Quite a banquet awaits those who decide to play Chain Mail, with all the symbols related to the theme. Lower value symbols include such unlikely items as the Coco-Knight Delight chocolate bar, an ice cream cone topped off with a crown, a delicious-looking kebab that’s been skewered with an arrow, a bucket of King’s Fried chicken and a pizza/shield combo.
Up the ranks of symbols and we find a strange red post box/castle icon that looks like it’s vomiting letters, a horse that’s listening to some tunes on his headphones, a smug knight who doubles up as a mailman, and the highest paying regular symbol is Princess Roxy chatting on her mobile phone.
You can question the historical accuracy of the symbols, but they are fun to look at and are a definite asset to the game.
Anyone from the lowest serf to the boldest nobleman can play Chain Mail, as the bet range runs from just 0.01 to 50.00 per spin. Players just select how many lines they wish to activate, from 1 to 20, how many coins to have on each line, from 1 to 5 and then how much each coin will be worth, with anything from 0.01 to 0.50 being available.
Then it’s time to spin the reels and see what wins can be had. The chocolate bar pays the least, with 4 coins when 3 of them land on a line, 15 coins for 4 of them and 40 coins for a full line of 5. At the top of the tower we find the Princess who is worth 20, 100 or 800 coins for the same combinations, and to get a prize, the symbols must run across an activated payline, running from the left side.
Chain Mail
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Medieval Merriment with Bonus Features
The highest-paying symbol of the lot however is the wild, which is the Chain Mail logo set against a wax seal of the type used to keep letters closed before the days of self-adhesive envelopes. When this lands on a line, on between 2 and 5 reels, the wins will range from just 4 coins up to the jackpot of 6,000 coins. It also, of course, helps players to get extra payouts by substituting for all other regular symbols if it will complete a winning line, and when this occurs the resulting wins will be doubled from their base value.
A mailbag has the job of scatter symbol in this game, so it doesn’t have to be on a payline to reward players with a win. Instead, 3, 4 or 5 of them will equal total bet multiples of 2x, 20x or 100x respectively.
There’s no free spins round however, so the main bonus game here is the Castle Bonus, triggered by a big ‘B’ symbol stopping on reels 1, 3 and 5 at once. In this round players are taken to a grid of doors set out over 5 floors of the castle. The aim is to click a single door per floor, collecting bonuses as you do so before moving up to the next level. Finding Princess Roxy means that all prizes on that level are won, but finding Uncle Mordread ends the game, although players still collect anything won so far.
A Feast for the Bankroll, or off with It’s Head?
Chain Mail is an entertaining pokie that has one of the more light-hearted, if somewhat confused designs in the Microgaming range. Some players may prefer more down to Earth games, but whatever your opinion of the theme, there are some decent wins to be had and the bonus round can pay out big money when the right doors are picked.
A free spins round would perhaps have been nice, however that’s a small issue in the context of an overall great game.