Bao Shi

Bao Shi is a Chinese temple slot from Play’n GO, released on 9 October 2025. It plays on a 5x4 grid with 1,024 ways, returns 96.2% at high volatility and tops out at 15,000x the bet. Its central idea is a symbol that exists in two versions, and you only get the good one inside the features.

Inside The Temple

The reels stand in a hall of red lacquered columns, incense smoke drifting between them, with an enormous gilded guardian lion mask mounted above the frame looking down at the grid. The Bao Shi logo sits in the bottom-left corner in brushed gold lettering.

The symbols are temple offerings: a golden bowl, a golden fish, a painted fan, a red pouch, and A, K, Q, J and 10 in carved jade and bronze. A lion-faced coin is the scatter. Paying symbols catch fire in their frames when they land.

Two Lions, And One Is Locked Away

The paytable opens with a section headed HIGH-PAYING containing the same creature twice, side by side, with a line of rules under each. At the 100.00 bet our session ran at, for five, four and three of a kind:

Lion – 400 / 100 / 50 – “Appears during base game only”
Golden lion – 680 / 300 / 200 – “Appears during the Blessings and Free Spins”

Those two rows describe the whole game. The golden version is worth three times the ordinary lion for four of a kind and four times for three – and it cannot land in the base game at all. Play’n GO has not made the feature better by adding new symbols; it has made it better by upgrading the one you already know.

The rest of the table, again per way at a 100.00 bet:

Gold bowl – 300 / 150
Golden fish – 200 / 100 / 40
Fan, Red pouch – 100 / 50 / 40
A – 70 / 30
K, Q – 50 / 30

The Values Are Per Way

This is the part that makes the small-looking numbers work, and the game lets you verify it. Every win is announced in the centre of the grid with the amount on top and the way count beneath.

Ours read “240 – 8 WAYS WON”. Eight ways at 30 apiece is 240, and 30 is exactly the queen’s four-of-a-kind value. Another read “1200 – 12 WAYS WON” – twelve ways at 100, which is the lion’s four-of-a-kind row. The arithmetic checks out both times.

So a paytable whose best line looks like 6.8x the stake is nothing of the sort. With 1,024 ways, a board carrying the lion on the first two reels in quantity multiplies that row twelve times over, and our 1,200 win was 12x the bet from four-of-a-kind symbols alone.

What The Session Produced

Four results worth recording, all at the 100.00 bet. A board of jacks and queens with fire on the middle reels paid 140. A screen with two gold medallions and a fish returned 500 from 2 ways. A spread of queens and tens paid 200 from 4 ways. And the best, seven lion heads filling the first two reels, paid 1,200 from twelve.

Our balance moved between 23,070 and 25,340 across the session. That is a narrow band for a high-volatility game, which is the usual story: the variance lives in the features, not in the spins between them.

Five Fixed Stakes

Play’n GO does not give you a slider here. A row of five chips sits along the bottom of the frame – 30.00, 40.00, 50.00, 75.00 and 100.00 – and you pick one.

Five preset stakes rather than a free range is a deliberate simplification, and a slightly unusual one. It removes the fiddling, but it also means the gap between the cheapest and dearest spin is only a factor of three and a bit.

96.2% At High Volatility

The return is around average. The high volatility rating and the 15,000x ceiling are both explained by the two-lion structure: with the golden version locked out of the base game, ordinary spins are capped at what the plain lion can do, and everything above that requires the Blessings round or free spins.

That is a cleaner arrangement than most. There is no jackpot ladder, no coin board and no buy menu – just a paytable that changes for the better when the feature starts, and 1,024 ways to multiply it.

The Grid Is Four Rows, Not Three

One structural detail explains the way count and is easy to miss from a screenshot. This is a 5x4 grid rather than the more common 5x3, and four rows on five reels is exactly what produces 1,024 ways – four to the power of five.

The extra row matters more than it sounds. Every additional position on a reel multiplies the way count for every symbol passing through it, which is why our twelve-way lion result was possible from just two reels of the creature. On a three-row grid the same two reels would have produced nine ways at most.

What The Bet Changes

Everything scales with the chip you pick. Our screenshots were taken at 100.00, where the golden lion pays 680 per way and the queen 30. At the 30.00 chip every figure is a little under a third of that; the multiples never move.

More From Play’n GO

Play’n GO releases at a pace few studios match. Fates Fortune and 1001 Mystery: Genie Fortunes are recent releases in a similar register, and Bullion Xpress shows the studio’s more mechanical side.

Who It Is For

Bao Shi is for players who like a game that explains itself. Every win prints its way count next to the amount, so the paytable can be checked against the screen in seconds – and it holds up. The design idea underneath is elegant: one symbol in two grades, the better grade reserved for the features, stated plainly in two lines of rules. A 96.2% return is fair, the artwork is handsome, and 1,024 ways turns modest per-way figures into real wins. The catch is the high volatility and the absence of anything to collect along the way – between features there is only the base paytable, and the plain lion is the best it offers. All six casinos we checked carry it.

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