Soaked By Seamen slot symbols and what each one triggers

Special symbols, and the job each one has

The ordinary symbols are the island cast and a set of card letters, and they behave the way paying symbols behave anywhere. Everything interesting is in the five pieces below, and the useful way to hold them in your head is by what they do to the board rather than by what they look like.

Two of them raise multipliers directly. One of them makes wilds. One of them removes symbols when nothing has paid. One of them is the key to the features. Nothing in this game is decorative.

The lighter, and the symbol it picks out

The lighter reveals one of the ordinary paying symbols. Every position on the board currently showing that symbol then receives a frame, and each of those positions goes up a step.

It is the only piece that raises several positions at once in a pattern you can read off the board. If the revealed symbol happens to be one that is sitting on four positions, four positions are framed, and because frames persist, that board is worth more for the rest of the chain or the rest of the feature.

Banana wilds and the countdown

A banana can land on any spin carrying a number from one to three. The number is a countdown measured in respins. When it runs out, the banana expands upward and downward to fill every position on its reel with wild symbols.

How much that is worth depends entirely on which reel it landed on, and this is where the uneven board stops being decoration. On an outer reel the expansion fills three positions. On one of the two middle reels it fills five. The same symbol with the same number on it is a materially different event depending on where it stopped.

A banana also turns up as one of the named outcomes of the side bet, and the two priced coconut entries both guarantee one on the opening spin. It is the piece the game's own extras are built around.

Bombs: the coconut and the blowfish

Bombs only matter when nothing has paid. If a spin produces no winning combination, the bombs on the board go off, remove symbols according to their type, and the emptied positions refill. Every position a bomb clears is raised one step, or two if it was already framed.

The coconut clears itself and adds a value of its own on top of the standard step: five, ten, fifteen, twenty or one hundred. That hundred is the reason the coconut is the piece the priced entries sell. The blowfish clears itself and every ordinary paying symbol next to it, which is a wider blast but adds no extra value — and it does not go off at all if a coconut is on the board, because the coconut takes precedence.

The effect of all this is that a dead spin is not quite a dead spin. It still leaves the board more valuable than it found it, which is the mechanism that keeps a 20.17% hit frequency from feeling like a wall.

The bonus symbol, and why four is not merely more than three

The bonus symbol is the rainbow skull, and three of them start the shorter free spins mode while four start the longer and stronger one. The difference is not just two extra spins: the stronger mode awards more frames per spin on average, which compounds across a feature where the multipliers are kept.

Once a feature is running, every further bonus symbol that lands adds one more spin to it. There is no stated ceiling on that in the material we have, so a feature can run longer than it was awarded.

The cheapest of the priced extras simply guarantees one bonus symbol in a particular place on the board, which tells you plainly what the studio thinks the symbol is worth.