Nectar of Power bonus symbols: the Nectar Wild and the Zeus Scatter

The wild, and the three reels it is allowed on

The Nectar Wild is the vessel of glowing nectar, and the studio's rule for it has two halves. It substitutes for all other symbols except the Zeus Scatter, which is the ordinary half. And it appears on the second, third and fourth reels only, which is not ordinary at all.

A restricted wild changes the shape of the game in a way that is easy to underestimate. On a five-reel line-pay slot, most wins begin on the first reel, which means the symbol most likely to complete a combination is barred from the one position where a combination starts. It cannot rescue a line that is missing its leftmost symbol, and it cannot extend a four-symbol win into a five-symbol one from the right-hand end.

What it does instead is hold the middle together. The three reels it can land on are the three that almost every line crosses, so a single wild in the centre can serve several of the thirty routes at once. That is why the restriction is not simply a tax on the player: it concentrates the wild where it does the most work for the line structure, rather than spreading it over five reels where a lot of it would be wasted.

The restriction holds inside the cascade too. A wild cannot appear on the outer reels when the grid is being refilled any more than it can on the first screen of a spin, so a long chain does not loosen the rule at any point. The cascade page sets out what does and does not move during a refill.

The scatter that pays before it opens anything

The Zeus Scatter does two jobs from the same combination. Three, four or five of them anywhere on the grid award a win, and the same three, four or five open the free games. The win is not conditional on the round that follows, and the round is not paid for out of the win: both happen.

That is a less common arrangement than it sounds. Plenty of games give a scatter one job or the other — a paying scatter that opens nothing, or a trigger symbol with no value of its own. Here the symbol is both, and since scatters are evaluated anywhere rather than along a line, the thirty fixed lines have nothing to do with whether it pays.

Zeus being the scatter rather than the top paying symbol is also what gives this game its slightly unexpected paytable: Aphrodite leads the regular symbols, and the god whose name everybody expects at the top is doing a different job. The order of the whole reel set is on the page about the setting.

Fifteen free games, and the hundred that can follow

Three or more Zeus Scatters open 15 free games. Inside that round, three, four or five scatters landing again add 100 games to the ones still to come. The arithmetic there is worth reading slowly: the additional games are added to the current remainder, so a retrigger early in the round and a retrigger near the end of it leave you in very different places even though the number added is the same.

One hundred added games is a large number by the standards of this kind of feature, and it is the single most consequential rule in the game's published description. A round that retriggers is not a slightly longer round, it is a different order of event from one that does not.

And it happens at most once. The studio states plainly that the free games can be retriggered only once, and that each subsequent scatter combination pays according to the paytable but awards no additional free games. So the scatter never stops being worth landing — it keeps its own win for the whole round — it simply stops extending the round after the first retrigger.

Why the single retrigger is the rule to remember

Features that can retrigger without limit are the ones that produce the stories, and a reader who assumes this is one of them will read a long free-games round as the start of something open-ended. It is not. The ceiling on the round is set by one retrigger, and after that the count only goes down.

This also sets a quiet boundary around the game's published maximum. CT Interactive puts the ceiling at 500x of the total bet, and the feature set it comes from has no multiplier in it at all: no collected multiplier, no rising meter, no bought bonus. A capped free-games round and no multiplier mechanic are consistent with a modest ceiling, which is one reason the far larger figure that circulates about this game sits so badly with the rest of its own description. That untangling is on the figures page.

Checking a symbol rule inside the game

Every rule above is published by the studio, and none of it is a substitute for the paytable in front of you. Exact symbol values, the trigger counts for the build you are on and anything version-specific live in the game's own paytable and information panel, which is where they are correct for the copy an operator installed.

That is not a disclaimer for its own sake. This game ships in more than one configuration — the studio's card lists two payout percentages for it — and a game with two builds can differ in more than a decimal place. If a number on a page matters to a decision you are about to make, the panel two taps from the reels outranks every page about the game, this one included.

One concrete warning on this title. At least one widely visible listing of the game publishes a feature table stating that it has no gamble feature, while the studio's own card for the game says it does. A table someone else compiled is a summary, not a rule, and the gamble page sets out what is confirmed and what is not.