Golden Fish Collector

Golden Fish Collector Overview

Golden Fish Collector is a three-reel, three-row Evoplay game that opens its rules with a sentence most slots would never write: “Golden Fish Collector does not use traditional paylines. Wins and feature activations are determined by special symbol combinations instead.”

There are exactly two symbols in the game. Golden fish carry cash values and land only on reels 1 and 3. A fisherman – the Collector – lands only on reel 2 and carries nothing at all. Put one of each on the reels and the fisherman takes everything the fish are holding.

Theme and Graphics

The whole screen is a cross-section of a lake. A wooden fishing boat bobs along the top edge above the waterline, and below it the reels hang in clear blue water among coral fans, seaweed and drifting bubbles. Empty reel positions are drawn as bubbles, which is an elegant solution – on a grid where most positions are usually empty, the blanks look intentional rather than absent.

The four jackpot plates run down the left in red, green, blue and pink, with the Bonus Buy button beneath. The fish are gold with orange fins; the fisherman wears a green hat and holds a rod.

Fish, Collectors and Fish Harvest

Fish symbols carry a random value of 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 7x, 8x or 12x the bet, or one of the four fixed jackpots. They appear only on the outer reels. The Collector appears only on the middle reel and holds no value of its own.

Fish Harvest is what happens when both are on screen together. The Collector collects the values from all Fish symbols, including the Mini, Minor, Major and Grand jackpots, and adds them to that spin's win. Crucially the rules say this works in the main game as well as the bonus – so a jackpot can be landed and harvested on an ordinary spin. The demo shows it plainly: a fish holding 150 on the right reel and a fisherman on the middle reel showing 150 alongside it.

Fisherman's Luck

A second route into the feature. The game can activate the Bonus Game in any round of the main game, provided at least one of the two symbols is somewhere on the reels – and when it does, new symbols appear on the empty positions and the round begins.

It is the same rescue idea several Evoplay titles use: a single stray symbol on an otherwise dead grid is enough to be worth something. On a nine-position board where most spins leave the reels almost entirely full of bubbles, that matters more than it would elsewhere – without it, a great many rounds would simply produce nothing at all.

The Bonus Game

The round proper needs at least one symbol on each of the three reels – which, given where each symbol is allowed to land, always means fish, fisherman, fish. It starts with three spins, every new symbol resets the counter back to three, and everything that triggered it stays in place. The reels then carry only fish, fishermen and bubbles, and at the end of every spin the collected values are added together.

What makes this version different from its stablemates is what happens on the middle reel. Collectors stack. The demo catches two fishermen sitting one above the other, each independently holding 1,750, and a later spin shows three of them on the same reel with values climbing to 2,350 apiece. At the 50.00 bet that is 47x per collector, and the rules confirm the arithmetic: when the Bonus Game ends, the sums from all the Collector symbols will be added to the total amount.

The Jackpots

Four fixed jackpots: Grand 1,000x, Major 150x, Minor 50x and Mini 25x the bet. At the 50.00 stake the plates read 50,000, 7,500, 2,500 and 1,250.

Unusually, these are not locked to the bonus round. The rules state they can be won in both the main and Bonus games, once Fish Harvest has activated – because a jackpot simply rides inside a fish symbol, and the fisherman collects it wherever he finds it.

Bonus Buy, RTP and Max Win

Two purchases are offered, and the difference between them is the whole point. The Standard Bonus Game costs 49x the total bet and grants one Collector plus two to six fish. The Premium Bonus Game costs 78x and grants one to three Collectors plus the same two to six fish. At the 50.00 stake the demo prices these at 2,450.00 and 3,900.00, matching exactly.

So the premium is roughly 60% more money for up to three times the collecting capacity – and since every collector banks its own total, the two do not scale the same way at all. The word to watch is up to: the premium package guarantees at least one collector and may give three, so it is a wager on the distribution rather than a purchase of three.

The RTP is 96.36%, one of the better figures in Evoplay's recent run, and volatility is rated Medium-High. The maximum win is 6,000x the bet.

That last number is the one to sit with. The Grand jackpot is 1,000x – a sixth of the ceiling. No single symbol in this game can pay the maximum, and no single collector can either. Reaching 6,000x means a middle reel stacked with fishermen, harvesting a grid of high-value fish, over a round that keeps resetting its own clock. Which is exactly what the Premium buy is for sale to produce.

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