A Pot of Gold Slot Machine
If you’re a fan of pub fruit machines or other land-based pokies, the chances are you’ll already be familiar with slot manufacturer JPM. If that’s the case, you’ll probably also have encountered A Pot Of Gold on your travels – and the good news is that the classic game is now available online too.
Featuring 3 reels and a single, central payline, A Pot Of Gold is about as simple as it gets in video slot terms but does offer a little something extra in terms of an auto nudge feature and random holds. The game offers a top regular payout of 25x your bet and can be played from as little as ￡0.50 a spin.
Easy Roller
As mentioned above, A Pot Of Gold is a game that will take you all of two seconds to get to grips with, as – with just a single active payline – the only thing you’ll need to worry about is how much to wager each spin. Stakes start at ￡0.50 and go up in ￡0.50 increments up to ￡5, with the paytable displayed on the right hand side of the screen adjusting accordingly based on your starting wager.
Beyond that there is a turbo play button that can be switched on for faster spins and three hold buttons, however this latter trio is purely a stylistic touch as the slot handles all hold decisions automatically. On the left hand side of the screen you’ll also see an auto nudge metre, but as the name would suggest, this is again automatic and doesn’t require any extra configuration by players.
In terms of the prizes on offer in A Pot Of Gold, players will be chasing a top award of 25x their starting bet for matching three four-leaf clovers, with smaller prizes of 10x and 5x your wager on offer for landing three rainbow or lucky horseshoe icons on the slot’s central payline respectively.
Irish Legend
As you’ve probably guessed from the name and the description of the symbols above, A Pot Of Gold draws on the traditional “luck of the Irish” theme by including a green and gold colour scheme and several icons that are intrinsically linked with good fortune in Celtic cultures.
Somewhat remarkably, there are only four symbols in the game in total – the aforementioned clovers, rainbows and horseshoes plus a pot of gold icon that acts as the game’s wild – which gives the reels a bit of a bare feel, but at least there are no boring playing card icons to dilute the product.
The background used in A Pot Of Gold unsurprisingly features a sparkling rainbow over a verdant field, with a pot of gold clearly visible above the box that displays your chosen stakes. All the information that you need to know about the game is also confined to one screen, making it a pick-up-and-play slot that won’t require you to read up on any complicated features or payout modes.
A Crock of...
Unfortunately, A Pot Of Gold features absolutely nothing in the way of bonus rounds, with the game’s only unique aspects coming in the form of the auto nudge feature and the random hold bonus. As readers will no doubt be aware, the first of these options causes the reels to move one space in a bid to create winning paylines, while the other holds reels in place on favourable boards.
While that’s all well and good, the fact that players have no control of these options makes them gimmicky at best, with the auto nudge feature never seeming to trigger when you really need it and the random hold bonus often resulting in another blank spin with no discernible upside to the user.
All in all, this makes the gameplay in A Pot Of Gold pretty underwhelming and the titular wild symbol in the game comes around so rarely that it doesn’t make any real difference to the game’s excitement factor or payouts. With that in mind, A Pot Of Gold is one for old-school slot purists only.
Keep it Indoors
While we always try to give classic slots a fair hearing despite the casino industry being dominated by far more exciting modern video slots, the fact is that even taken on its own merits, A Pot Of Gold doesn’t offer much fun to players. The payouts are low, the symbols are few and bonuses are non-existent, meaning that the vast majority of players are better off spending their cash elsewhere.
