Dragon 8s Online Slot Guide for Players
In a handsome bamboo-roofed wooden pagoda, its roof-beams carved with dragons’ heads, five reels displaying 15 windows spin in Dragon 8s Top 20, an online video slot title from Amaya. The Top 20 refers to the game’s 20 fixed paylines, and as the title suggests, Dragon 8s Top 20 combines two lucky symbols from Chinese culture, the dragon and the number 8, in a very loose theme. There is no story as such, but all the symbols relate to artefacts that are considered lucky, or attractors of wealth, in China.
Although players have to bet on all 20 paylines on every spin, they can set coin denominations at 0.01, 0.05, 0.10 and 0.25, and play between 1 and 10 coins per line, per spin. Bright primary colours and 3D artwork make the backdrop of meadows and mountains and the reel symbols stand out, and Dragon 8s Top 20 plays with a fairly quiet hum, apart from xylophone, synth and gong effects to celebrate wins. There are nine ordinary payline symbols in play, along with a Wild, a Scatter and a Bonus icon to enable special wins.
Dragons and 8s Dominate the Payline Symbols
Instead of the hackneyed poker symbols, Dragon 8s Top 20 uses five 8s as its low-value icons, in a variety of pastel hues, each numeral entwined by its own unique dragon in complementary colours. All require at least three of a kind on a payline from Reel 1 to win prizes, and for five matches the purple, red, blue, orange and yellow 8s respectively win 60, 100, 100, 120 or 150 coins.
The other four Dragon 8s Top 20 payline symbols are wild creatures: a goldfish and a crane pay 200 and 250 coins for five of a kind. The panda bear and the impressive, fire-spitting blue dragon icons are rewarded for two matches with 2 or 3 coins, and their respective top wins for five of a kind are 250 or 300 coins.
Bonus Give Free Spins, Scatter Pays Immediately
Like many Neteller slots, Dragon 8s Top 20 uses both a Bonus and a Scatter symbol. The Bonus icon is a red paper lantern, and three or more in any reel windows trigger a free spins round. First, the screen changes to a street of paper lanterns, and the player must pick one to release a shower of lucky coins and the number of free spins: between 4 and 7. From the coins scattered on the street, the player picks one to reveal the multiplier, between X3 and X6, for the round. Three more Bonus symbols during the round trigger the same number of spins at the same multiplier.
The Dragon 8s Top 20 Scatter icon, an exquisite fan, pays 1X, 2X, 15X or 200X the full spin bet for two, three, four or five appearances in any windows.
Wild Adds Multiplier; Wins Top Payline Prize
The Dragon 8s Top 20 Wild is a red, black and blue demon mask, and it applies a 2X multiplier to any prizes won with the Wild substituting for another payline symbol. Two or more Wilds in sequence from reel 1 on the same payline win 15, 100, 1,000 or 5,000 coins, which is the top payline prize in Dragon 8s Top 20.