Golden Princess Pokie
The ancient Aztec civilization is the theme of Golden Princess, a 5 reel, 25 payline pokie from Microgaming. It’s been around for a while, which shows in the fairly basic design, but has some nice bonus features like free spins and multiplier payouts, so players shouldn’t dismiss it just because it’s not the most up to date game in the world.
The Golden Princess herself is a beautiful maiden who takes her place as the highest value regular symbol, while others include an Aztec warrior, black panther, leopard and the traditional high card symbols 10, J, Q, K and A, all designed to fit in with the golden theme.
Surrounding the reels is an elaborate design made to look like a carved panel of gold, while control buttons beneath them give players the option to select bet sizes from just 0.01 per spin right up to 125.00. Unless players are on a tight budget, or happy to see winning combinations pass them by on lines they haven't activated, it’s always worth having a bet on all of them which will still only risk 0.25 a go at the minimum line stake.
Golden Princess
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Golden Opportunities for Wins
Players win whenever 3 or more of the same symbol land on an active payline, running from the left side, with 4 or 5 on a line being worth substantially more. To help this process, the Golden Princess logo, with a gleaming pyramid on it, is a wild symbol that acts as any other apart from the scatter, if it means a winning combination can be formed.
As a nice extra treat, a random prize multiplier of 2x or 3x will be applied each time this occurs, although on the other hand, unlike in many other pokies, the wild on its own won’t pay anything out, even if a full line of them lands across the reels.
Each time a winning combination is made up, a nice animation to the symbols is played, with the card icons flashing their golden hues and the big cats giving out a hearty roar for example.
A treasure chest is the scatter symbol, and when it lands in any 3 or more positions, a free spins round will be triggered. The number of games that play out depends on how many scatters appear, with 3, 4 or 5 equalling 10, 20 or 30 free spins. If the treasure chest appears during them, a mystery win of up to 10x the triggering bet amount will be paid, and just to make sure that this is an especially rewarding part of the game, all wild symbols are stacked several high on the reels, which can lead to multiple payouts at once.
The only downside to the free spins round is that they can’t be re-triggered if 3 or more scatters appear again, but with the random multiplier and additional wilds, who’s complaining?
Whatever players win, they can choose to gamble it for a bigger prize. All they have to do to double the amount won is correctly predict if a playing card will be revealed as red or black, while to quadruple it, they will need to guess the correct suit. This can be repeated over and over until the gamble limit is reached, but a single wrong guess along the way loses the triggering bet and all gains so far from the gamble round.
The Verdict
OK, so it’s not visually stunning, but neither is it dull to look at either, with all that shiny gold surrounding the reels and adding depth to many of the symbols. The theme is sure to be a big hit as well, with ancient cultures featuring in many of the most widely played games, but the real highlights are the wild multipliers, that seem to appear with every few spins, and the richly rewarding free spins round, which can be a little trickier to enter, but with pretty decent payouts almost guaranteed when it starts.
The gamble round may seem like a tempting proposition, but in practice these can be quite risky, so maybe playing it with some of the smaller wins that won’t matter so much if lost is a better idea than risking bigger prizes.