18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The fish lasted less than a second.
A Surrounding Wild had landed near the middle of the grid.
Everything around it changed.
Fish.
Gone.
Whatever sea creature had been above it.
Gone.
The one beside it.
Also gone.
Eight neighbouring positions had been minding their own underwater business and were now Wild because they had stood too close to the wrong symbol.
The original Wild stayed where it was.
Sticky.
There were four Free Spins left.
Fresh sea creatures would have to land around that position again.
I already knew what was going to happen to them.
Coral Queen – Oranje Jackpot had created a permanent bad neighbourhood in the middle of the ocean.
I was delighted.
The session had begun much more politely.
€100.00.
€0.80 per spin.
A 5×4 grid sitting under blue water with twenty paylines running through sea creatures that, initially, were permitted to remain sea creatures.
The first several spins behaved like a low-volatility underwater kingdom should.
Three matching symbols.
€1.60.
Another line.
€2.40.
A better creature stretched far enough across the reels for €4.00.
Nothing required emergency coral.
Then a Wild appeared in an ordinary position.
No expansion.
No conversion.
It simply occupied a useful gap and helped a line reach reel four.
€5.60.
Fine.
A Wild doing Wild work.
The ocean still had rules.
A few spins later, another one arrived and immediately removed that assumption.
It expanded vertically.
The entire third reel became Wild.
Four positions.
Whatever had been swimming there ceased to matter.
A line through the middle connected.
Another lower down found the same Wild column.
€7.20 from the spin.
The reel returned to normal afterward.
I kept €0.80.
There was now a distinction worth watching.
Some Wilds appeared wherever they liked.
Some decided an entire vertical slice of the sea no longer required wildlife.
The third kind arrived about ten spins later.
Surrounding Wild.
It landed one position in from the edge.
The symbols beside it changed to Wild.
The ones above and below it changed.
The diagonals changed.
The conversion created enough help for two small lines.
€6.40.
Then the spin ended and the reef put everyone back where they belonged on the next round.
That one was different.
The expanding Wild conquered a reel.
The Surrounding Wild corrupted its immediate social circle.
This was not a distinction I had expected to care about when I opened a slot featuring an underwater Queen.
By €90, it was nearly all I cared about.
A Random Wild appeared.
Useful.
€3.20.
An Expanding Wild landed on reel five.
Whole reel Wild.
No line reached it.
The sea had dedicated 20% of the visible kingdom to a Wild column at the exact point where nobody needed one.
It vanished.
Several ordinary spins followed.
Pearl Scatter.
Alone.
Gone.
Two pearls later.
No third.
A small creature line paid €2.00.
Another Surrounding Wild appeared near the upper corner.
Because it was on the edge, it had fewer neighbours to interfere with.
It converted the symbols around it anyway.
The result paid €3.60.
This immediately established that even underwater magical contamination had property boundaries.
Middle of the grid: eight potential victims.
Corner: considerably less damage.
I began wanting one in the centre.
Not because the payout would necessarily be better.
Because maximum marine identity loss had become the obvious scientific target.
The balance drifted.
€87.
€84.
A decent Expanding Wild spin pushed it back to €90.20.
Then several rounds with nothing beyond small €0.80 and €1.60 returns pulled it down again.
The jackpot feature never appeared.
There were four progressive prizes somewhere in the kingdom, supposedly capable of interrupting a base spin and turning matching jackpot symbols into something much more serious.
They stayed submerged elsewhere.
Good.
I had enough trouble identifying the fish.
At €81.20, three pearl Scatters finally appeared.
One on the left.
One near the middle.
One on the right.
The pearls glowed.
The base game stopped.
A choice appeared.
The Queen offered three different approaches to Wild behaviour.
One involved patience and the more spontaneous kind.
One offered fewer spins with Wilds that liked taking entire reels.
The shortest route belonged to the ones that changed everything around them.
Six spins.
I chose the contagious reef.
There are moments when ten Free Spins are objectively more Free Spins.
There are other moments when a symbol capable of removing eight sea creatures’ identities sounds like a better use of the evening.
Six it was.
First Free Spin.
No Surrounding Wild.
A small line paid €1.60.
Five left.
Second spin.
There.
Near the middle.
The Surrounding Wild landed.
The eight positions around it changed.
The screen abruptly contained a block of Wilds surrounding one permanent centre.
Several lines crossed through the mess.
€5.60.
More importantly, the original Surrounding Wild did not leave.
Sticky.
Four spins remaining.
The converted neighbours did not need to become permanent for this to be interesting.
The source of the problem was staying.
Third spin.
New symbols arrived around the fixed Wild.
For approximately no time at all, they were fish.
The Surrounding Wild activated.
Its neighbourhood changed again.
The middle of the grid became Wild territory.
A line across the upper half connected.
Then another through the centre.
€4.00.
The Wild remained.
I stopped hoping for a particularly valuable sea creature to land beside it.
There was no point learning their faces.
Anything moving into those eight positions was about to lose the argument.
Fourth Free Spin.
A second Surrounding Wild landed.
Reel four.
Lower down.
Not directly beside the first one, but close enough that their affected areas started interfering with the same part of the grid.
That was better.
The first Wild converted its neighbours.
The second converted its own.
Some of the transformed positions sat in the same general cluster.
The bottom half of the ocean had become less aquarium and more conceptual disagreement.
Lines formed through the Wild mass.
€9.60.
Both original Wilds stayed.
Two spins remaining.
This was the first time I properly appreciated the six-spin choice.
Ten spins with random Wilds sounded sensible.
Eight with expanding ones sounded strong.
Six with surrounding ones had produced two permanent contamination points and left me staring at the incoming symbols to see which creatures would survive outside their radius.
Fifth Free Spin.
The reels landed.
There was a sea creature on reel one safely away from everything.
Another near the top.
Several symbols in the centre never got the chance.
Both sticky Surrounding Wilds activated.
The middle and lower-right area changed.
A good symbol on reel one found matching help through the converted positions.
Multiple paylines survived across the grid.
€11.20.
That was the biggest spin of the feature.
Not huge.
No underwater palace cracked open.
No jackpot swam past.
Just two sticky Wilds repeatedly making ordinary sea life irrelevant.
One spin left.
I wanted a third Surrounding Wild.
There was no financial logic behind that anymore.
The feature was already useful.
I wanted to see how little actual marine life could remain on a 5×4 grid before the Queen admitted she had overdone it.
Final spin.
The reels stopped.
No third Wild.
The two existing ones stayed.
Their neighbourhoods converted again.
A few symbols remained themselves around the outer edges.
The centre did not.
One line connected through both affected regions.
Another used only the first.
€6.40.
Feature finished.
The six Free Spins paid €38.40 altogether.
My balance moved to €119.60.
The sticky Wilds vanished.
Actual sea creatures returned to all twenty positions at once.
That was unexpectedly strange.
For four consecutive spins, the centre of the screen had not been allowed to maintain a stable population.
Now everyone was back.
Fish being fish.
Shell creatures being shell creatures.
Nobody being converted because they happened to live one square away from a permanent Wild.
The reef had recovered with suspicious speed.
I stayed at €0.80.
First base spin after the feature.
Random Wild.
It helped one line.
€2.40.
Second.
Pearl Scatter.
Only one.
Nothing.
Third spin.
Surrounding Wild.
It landed in a corner.
For a moment, the old behaviour returned.
The few neighbours it actually had changed to Wild.
One small line connected.
€3.20.
Then the result finished.
The Surrounding Wild disappeared.
No stickiness.
No permanent contaminated patch.
No incoming sea creatures doomed to spend the next spin becoming Wild because they had rented the wrong square.
I stopped at €120.40.
The last visible result still had ordinary fish occupying the positions around where that corner Wild had been.
They were allowed to keep their species again.
Apparently sticky royal magic ended at the Free Spins border.
Twofold The Gold came free-to-play and left with my peace of mind.