Soaked By Seamen slot features, one spin at a time

Win respins and fire frames

When a combination pays, the symbols that formed it are taken off the board. Each position they were standing on has its multiplier raised by one step, and fresh symbols fall into the empty places. If the new arrangement pays, the whole thing happens again. A single opening spin can therefore resolve into a short chain of events rather than one result.

The multiplier that is left behind belongs to the position, not to the symbol that earned it. That distinction is the hinge of the design. A symbol landing later on a position that has been raised four times is worth four times more there than it would be one square across, and nothing about the symbol itself has changed.

Frames are the second source of those steps, and they arrive without being earned. On every spin the game scatters them onto random positions, and a framed position gains a step. If a paying symbol happens to be sitting on a framed position when that happens, the step is doubled rather than single. On top of that, every respin in the chain adds one further frame, so a long chain quietly builds a board that is worth more than the one it started on.

How a position keeps its multiplier

It is worth being precise about when these values apply, because the wording on most pages is loose. A position multiplier applies to a symbol occupying that position in a win. It is not a global multiplier on the spin and it is not attached to a symbol that moves.

In the base game the values persist through the respin chain and the board resets when the chain ends. Inside either free spins mode they are kept for the whole feature, which is the entire reason the feature is worth more than the same number of base spins. A board that has been accumulating for eight spins is a different board.

The practical consequence is that the interesting moment in this game is rarely the first spin of a feature. It is the fifth or sixth, when a cluster of positions has been raised repeatedly and a stack reveal drops the same symbol across several of them at once.

xWays and the stack reveal

The stack symbol does not pay by itself. It turns into an ordinary paying symbol and brings a stack of two to four copies of that symbol with it, occupying the positions it expands into. Because the count of ways is the product of the reel heights, adding symbols to a reel for one spin widens that product for that spin.

When more than one of these lands on the same spin, they all reveal the same paying symbol rather than choosing independently. That is deliberate and it is where the big base-game results come from: two reveals of the same symbol on the two tall middle columns connect across the board in a way two different symbols never would.

The mechanic is the studio's own and it appears across its catalogue rather than being invented for this title. If you have met it elsewhere it behaves the same way here, on a narrower board.

xTra, and why the round does not have to end

At the end of a round the game may offer to sell you one more spin. The offer is not a feature buy and does not start anything: it continues the board you already have, keeping the position multipliers and the frames the previous spin finished with.

This is the mechanic most worth being careful about, precisely because it is cheap-looking and arrives at the moment a board has just become interesting. The price is set against a board you can see, so it is easy to judge as good value, and it can be accepted repeatedly. Players who dislike this game dislike this part of it, and the complaint is a fair one: it converts a known stake into an open-ended one.

Soaked By Seamen in one worked spin

Put it together. The reels stop; two frames have landed on the tall third column, raising both positions a step. A group of paying symbols includes one of those positions, so that position goes up by two rather than one while the rest go up by one, and all of them are removed. Refills drop in, one of them is a stack symbol, it reveals a paying symbol four high on the third column, and three of the four land on positions that were raised a moment ago.

Nothing in that sequence is unusual for this game. It is the normal shape of a paying spin, and it is why a hit frequency of one in five does not feel like one in five while it is happening.