Lion Gems 3 Pots: Hold and Win

Lion Gems 3 Pots Overview

Lion Gems 3 Pots: Hold and Win is a Playson slot on a five-by-four grid with 30 paylines, four jackpot tiers and three baskets of gems mounted above the reels. The baskets are the game: DOUBLE, MYSTERY and COLLECT.

Its top jackpot also happens to be its ceiling. The Grand pays 5,000x the bet, and 5,000x is the published maximum win – landing it is not a step towards the limit, it is the limit.

Theme and Graphics

The setting is an African plain at sunset: an orange sky over low hills, acacia trees in silhouette, and dry grass running along the bottom of the screen. During the free spins the whole scene deepens to red and the reel frame burns at the edges.

Three woven baskets sit on a shelf above the grid, each heaped with gems of a different colour and labelled beneath – red for DOUBLE, green for MYSTERY, purple for COLLECT. The four jackpot plates run down the left in gold, yellow, blue and pink, with a red BONUS button beneath them.

The symbols are painted African wildlife on coloured panels – a rhinoceros on red, a lioness on green, a zebra on blue, a warthog on purple, a male lion – with card letters filling the lower ranks. All figures below come from demo play at a 10.00 bet.

Thirty Lines and a Modest Paytable

Five reels by four rows gives twenty positions, and the game runs 30 paylines across them.

The rhinoceros leads at 125.00 for five, 25.00 for four and 7.50 for three. Against the 10.00 stake that is 12.5x, 2.5x and 0.75x. The lioness follows at 100.00 / 20.00 / 6.00 – 10x, 2x and 0.6x – with the zebra and warthog below her.

Look at the three-of-a-kind rung. The best animal in the game returns three quarters of the stake for three of a kind; the second-best returns six tenths. On a thirty-line grid, three-symbol combinations are what lands most often, and almost all of them lose money.

The demo confirms the ordinary scale. One base spin pays 12.00 on a 10.00 bet – 1.2x. Another, with three flaming scatters on the board, pays 20.00 – twice the stake for the trigger itself.

Paying something for the trigger is a small kindness that not every studio bothers with. Two times the stake will not change a session, but it means the spin that starts the feature is never itself a losing one.

The Free Spins

The round runs to 8 free spins, with the counter printed on a banner across the foot of the reels – 4/8, 5/8, 7/8, 8/8 – and a running TOTAL WIN beneath it.

The captures cover more than one round, and the running totals give a useful range. One round stood at 560.00 after four spins – an individual spin having just added 40.00 – and 674.00 after five. Another read 662.00 with the counter at 8 of 8. The largest figure in the session was 1,507.00.

That closing figure is 150 times the bet from a round of eight spins, on a game whose best payline combination pays 12.5x. The free spins are not an enhanced version of the base game; they are a different game.

The Gem Values

Inside the round the reels fill with cut gems carrying cash values, and the demo captures a wide spread: 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 60, 80, 120 and 380.

Against the 10.00 stake that is 1x at the bottom and 38x at the top. A single 380.00 gem is worth three times what five rhinoceroses pay across a complete payline.

One board holds ten of them at once – two 20s, two 15s, a 120, a 50, a 40, an 80, a 380 and another 20 – with a TOTAL WIN banner running above the reels as they resolve. The distance between a board of 15s and a board containing a 380 is the whole variance of the feature.

Double, Mystery and Collect

The three baskets name what they do. COLLECT gathers the gem values on the board into a single prize; DOUBLE multiplies what has been gathered; MYSTERY turns unknown positions into values.

Which of the three are active is the only question that matters in a round, and the game builds its entire buy menu around exactly that.

Mounting them physically above the reels, as baskets on a shelf rather than as icons in a status bar, is a nice touch: the player can see at a glance which are lit without reading anything. On a game where the answer decides the round’s value, that is worth more than a well-written rules page.

The Buy Menu

The BONUS button opens two options, and the difference is a guarantee rather than a length:

BONUS – 1, 2 or 3 Features – 750.00.
SUPER BONUS – All 3 Features Guaranteed – 3,000.00.

At the 10.00 bet those price at 75x and 300x the stake. The premium version costs four times the standard one – a steeper step than the same studio charges on 3 Royal Coins, where the equivalent guarantee is priced at 2.7 times the base option.

Whether it is worth it depends entirely on how much Double contributes, since a doubled collection on a board holding a 380 gem is a very different number from an undoubled one. The demo’s 1,507.00 round gives some sense of the scale involved.

The Four Jackpots

The plates read Grand 50,000.00, Major 1,500.00, Minor 500.00 and Mini 150.00. At the 10.00 bet those are 5,000x, 150x, 50x and 15x.

The steps are uneven and end in a cliff: Mini to Minor multiplies by three and a bit, Minor to Major by three, and Major to Grand by more than thirty.

The bottom three tiers are outcomes a good round can produce – the demo’s 1,507.00 result already beat the Major. The Grand belongs to another category entirely, and being identical to the game’s maximum win is the clearest possible statement of that.

RTP, Volatility and Max Win

The RTP is 95.76%, a little under the modern standard. Volatility is rated Medium-High and the maximum win is 5,000x the bet.

Medium-High is a fair call rather than an understatement. Thirty lines on twenty positions produce results on a good share of spins, but a paytable whose three-of-a-kind rungs sit below the stake means most of those results are small losses dressed up as wins.

What saves it is that the feature arrives at a sensible frequency and pays properly when it does. A 150x round from eight free spins is a real result, and the gem values make every board in the round legible at a glance – you can see what it is worth before it resolves.

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