Treasures of Horus

Treasures of Horus is a five-reel, 25-line slot with a Hold & Win bonus: six golden scarabs anywhere start respins in which only scarabs count, and four fixed jackpots go up to the GRAND at 1,000 bets. We counted every reel position. It returns 95.14%, and the bonus comes once in 102 spins, paying 30.4 bets on average.

Five reels, three rows, 25 lines. Your bet is split evenly between the lines, so at 100 debens a spin each line carries 4. A line pays three, four or five matching symbols in a row from the leftmost reel. The wild Horus lands only on reels 2, 3 and 4 and stands in for anything except a scarab. A scarab never pays on a line and breaks any line it sits on.

Twenty-five lines sound like a lot, and they do pay often, but in small amounts. Line wins bring back 65.38% of everything bet — more than two thirds of the machine’s return — yet the most the lines can pay in a single spin is 108 bets. Anything bigger comes from the scarabs.

Every reel has scarabs, some single and one stacked pair: five per strip on reels 1, 3 and 5, four on reels 2 and 4. Each scarab that lands shows a prize — a multiple of your whole bet or a jackpot. In the base game the prizes are only on display; they pay when a bonus starts.

An average scarab is worth 3.02 bets in the base game and 3.31 in the bonus. Keep that number in mind: a bonus that starts with six scarabs has about 18 bets on the screen before a single respin.

1. Six or more scarabs anywhere on the screen start the bonus. They stay in place, every other cell empties, and the respin counter shows 3.
2. On each respin every empty cell, on its own, has a 1 in 18 chance to fill with a new scarab. Any new scarab puts the counter back to 3; a respin with none takes one off.
3. The bonus ends when the counter reaches zero or all 15 cells are full. Then every scarab pays its prize, and a full screen adds the GRAND, 1,000 bets.
4. Line wins of the spin that started the bonus are paid as well. The whole bonus is decided on the server in the same moment as the spin itself.

You can play a bonus with exactly these chances in the Hold & Win guide.

Most bonuses start with the minimum six, and their 29.8 bets split like this: 18.1 are already on the screen when the bonus begins, 8.6 come from new scarabs (2.6 of them on average) and 3.0 is the GRAND’s share, a thousand bets times its 0.3% chance.

A bonus plays 6.6 respins on average and ends with 8.8 scarabs. In 22% of bonuses not one new scarab lands: three empty respins, and the bonus pays what was there at the start.

The jackpots are fixed multiples of your own bet. They do not build up over time, other players’ bets do not feed them, and the return is the same at every stake. A GRAND round pays about 1,048 bets on average: the jackpot plus some 48 bets on the scarabs themselves.

We went through all 38 × 39 × 40 × 39 × 38 = 87,852,960 reel positions, scoring the 25 lines and counting scarabs on each. The bonus is a chain of respins in which only two things matter — how many cells are full and how many respins are left — so we worked out the exact probability of every ending and combined it with the prize weights. A check run of 100 million spins with the game’s own code gave 95.16% ± 0.07% and 3,143 GRANDs, one in 31,800 spins, right where the exact figures put them.

The 2,130 bets are pure theory: an 80-bet line win and six MINOR scarabs on the same spin, then nine new scarabs, every one a MAJOR, and the GRAND on top. The biggest win in our 100 million simulated spins was 1,157 bets.

• Five scarabs do not mean the sixth is near. In the base game scarabs do not stay between spins; every spin starts from scratch with the same 1 in 102.
• There is no good moment for a jackpot. The jackpots never grow, so they are worth the same at any time of day and after any streak.
• Bet size changes nothing but the amounts. The jackpots are tied to the bet, so the return is 95.14% at 100 debens and at 50,000.
• Expect the money to come in drips. Two thirds of the return is small line wins; the bonus adds the jumps. In our 20,000 test sessions with 10,000 debens at 100 a spin, the median one lasted 733 spins — longer than on the other two machines.