Gladiator Plus

Gladiator Plus Overview

Gladiator Plus is a GameArt slot on a six-by-three grid giving 729 ways to win, and it pairs two mechanics that rarely appear together: wilds carrying their own multipliers, and a single expanding symbol chosen at the start of the free spins.

The result is a Book-style bonus running on a ways engine, which is an unusual combination and a considerably more volatile one than either part suggests.

Theme and Graphics

The art is painted rather than rendered, and it is genuinely striking. The base game looks down into the sand of an arena, the walls rising in shadow around it, with two gladiators facing one another beneath the reels – one with a net and trident, one with a shield and short sword. They are drawn as figures in a painting, not as animated sprites.

The reel panel is a slab of weathered stone hung on the arena wall, deliberately dark, so the symbols read as carvings rather than icons. Trigger the free spins and the whole scene shifts to cold blue moonlight with the sand gone to water.

The symbols are helmets, shields, a laurelled emperor and a leopard, with card letters cut into the same stone. All figures below come from demo play at bets of 3.00 and 12.00.

729 Ways on Eighteen Positions

Six reels of three rows gives eighteen positions, and three to the power of six is 729 – the ways count is the arithmetic of the grid rather than a marketing figure.

Ways games pay left to right on adjacent reels regardless of position, so a six-reel run is worth considerably more than the five-reel equivalent most slots offer. It also means the sixth reel matters enormously: a combination that dies on reel five is worth a fraction of one that reaches the end.

The demo’s results at the 12.00 stake run 24.00, 72.00, 84.00, 108.00, 189.00 and 203.40 – that is 2x, 6x, 7x, 9x, 15.75x and 16.95x. At the 3.00 stake a smaller board pays 6.00, or 2x.

The Multiplier Wilds

The wild is a leopard’s head, and it never lands plain. Every one in the captures carries a multiplier printed beneath it: the demo shows Wx2 and Wx3, and on one board two Wx3 wilds side by side on adjacent reels.

That board paid 189.00 on a 12.00 stake – nearly sixteen times the bet – and it is the clearest illustration of what the mechanic does. A wild that substitutes is useful; a wild that substitutes and triples is a different order of thing, and two of them on consecutive reels of a ways game compound against each other.

Another capture shows a single Wx3 on the middle of the grid for 108.00, or nine times the stake. The pattern across the session is consistent: the boards with multiplier wilds on them pay several times what the plain boards do.

The Expanding Symbol

The free spins round opens with a reveal screen headed EXPANDING SYMBOL, and a single symbol is drawn and shown in a gold frame. In the demo it comes up K.

From that point the round behaves like a Book game: wherever the chosen symbol lands it expands to fill its entire reel, and it pays across every reel it occupies rather than only on adjacent ones.

The captures show it working. One board late in the round has K expanded across the first three reels, filling nine of the eighteen positions, with a Wx2 leopard on the fourth. The running total on that round reached 203.40 against the 12.00 stake – just under seventeen times the bet.

The choice of symbol is everything here, and the player does not make it. Drawing the K – one of the cheapest symbols on the table – is a considerably worse outcome than drawing the emperor, and the round is decided before the first spin.

Ten Spins, and More

The award screen is unambiguous: CONGRATULATIONS – YOU WON 10 FREE SPINS.

The round can extend. One capture shows +1 plates on either side of the FREE SPINS banner at the top of the screen, so additional spins arrive one at a time rather than in blocks of five or ten. The counter in the demo runs down from eight to zero across the captures.

Adding spins singly is a slower, steadier form of retrigger than the usual arrangement, and on a round whose value depends on a single expanding symbol it is the sensible design: each extra spin is another chance for that symbol to land on more reels.

The Buy Bonus

A gold BUY BONUS control opens a panel with one option and its terms printed beneath it:

3+ Scatter symbols will trigger 10 FREE SPINS – 300.00 at a 3.00 bet.

That is 100 times the stake, or ten times the bet per free spin. The scatter is a red shield bearing a G, and the demo catches three of them landing naturally for a 6.00 result at the same stake – so the trigger itself pays twice the bet before the round begins.

A hundred times the stake is a steep price, and it sets a clear bar: the round has to average more than ten times the bet per spin to justify it. The demo’s round, at just under 17x across ten spins, did not – though it was a round where the expanding symbol came up K.

RTP, Volatility and Max Win

The RTP is 96.54%, comfortably above the modern standard, and the maximum win is 10,000x the bet. Volatility is rated Very High.

Very High is rarer than High as a published rating, and it is the right call here. Everything about the structure concentrates the money: 729 ways produce frequent small results, the wilds only matter when they carry a large multiplier, and the free spins round is decided by a draw the player has no influence over.

The arithmetic to the ceiling is at least visible. A six-reel run under two Wx3 wilds is nine times its base value; the same run with an expanding high symbol underneath it multiplies again. Nothing else is needed, and nothing else is offered.

What makes it worth playing is the return figure and the art. A 96.54% slot with a painted arena, two gladiators watching from beneath the reels, and a bonus that changes the light as well as the reels is a more considered piece of work than the theme usually attracts.

A note on availability, checked in September 2025: this title is not currently listed at the casinos we track, though catalogue line-ups change regularly and the free demo above runs either way.

You can try this game on LuckyBar Online Casino. There’s a unique casino bonus offer of 300% up to £1500 for a limited time.