Sails of Gold

Sails of Gold pays tribute to the man responsible for discovering the new world, which is today known as the American continent, Christopher Columbus. The game theme is best visualized by the symbols of Columbus himself, as the wild, and his ship which is the scatter in the game. So we invite you to make sail to a new world of opportunities which can be relived, right there on the reels of your screen.

 

Developers

 

The designers behind this video pokie game are Play ‘N Go. Many experienced gamblers will agree that this game is almost a clone of the Novamatic Columbus Deluxe, whether if it’s true or not we’ll let you decide. The visual effects are nothing special and more attention has been dedicated to the overall game concept and payout potential.

 

How to Play

 

Sails of Gold has only 10 active pay lines and 5 reels. Players can choose whether to play on all of them, or make combinations by reducing the pay line number. The minimum bet with all pay lines active is only $0.10 making it a perfect game for low roller players, but those with deeper pockets can hit the maximum $50 per spin and try to win big. If you ever get tired of spinning the auto play option is always there to take the load of your fingers.

 

Special Features

 

If you want to win big on a pokie game, your choice should depend on what the bonus feature has to offer, along with the general symbols pay table. If you take a look at what Sails of Gold has to offer you won’t be too impressed. The highest paying symbol is the wild and 5 of them on a winning pay line award a 5,000 coin win. We all know that this is very hard to get, but the bonus round can make this win possible.

 

The free spins here are triggered if you get a scatter symbol on reels 1, 3 and 5. You are awarded with an initial 10 free spins and they can be re-triggered, if another set of 3 scatters lands on the same reels again.

 

The great detail in this bonus round is that the scatter symbols now act as extra wilds and can contribute for more winning combinations. Usually the biggest wins can come with 3 scatters on a pay line and a high paying symbol in between. So far we don’t know how many retriggers can occur in the bonus round, but we hope it is a big number making this game worth playing.

 

Maximums Payout

 

The maximum payout promoted in this game is 250,000 coins which, after you go through the game rules, seems impossible to achieve. The highest paying symbol is the wild, with a 5,000 coins payout for 5 of them on a winning  pay line, so we are not quite sure how the maximum payout can be achieved. You will surely need a big number of retriggers in the bonus round, a lot of 5 of a kind wild wins and a whole lot of luck.

 

Summary

 

Sails of Gold seems like a decent, low variance pokie game but we are not quite confident of its payout potential. We tried it for real play and put in a big number of spins, but the results were disappointing. Base play wins were always small, with occasional medium hits but our balance was still dropping.

 

There are a lot of empty spins and the only hope for recovering your losses is in the free spins bonus round. But like we anticipated, the bonus round doesn’t provide any decent wins either. This is mainly due to the fact that there is no multiplier added whatsoever. This is one of the rare games where the winnings depend solely on the wild symbol. The bonus round does come often but retriggers are rare and usually happen only once.

 

With only 20 free spins and no multiplier, our biggest win was about 40 x bet which is way too low for the balance we lost during base play. Maybe the game wasn’t in a paying mood during our session, but we still think that Sails of Gold is not a game you should play to win big. You can try it yourself if you like and we hope you will have more success than us.