Bone Raiders

Bone Raiders: Slot Overview

Bone Raiders, who exactly raids bones? Are we talking about people who illegally acquire fossils and sell them on the black market or tomb raiders? We're assuming the second definition is a closer fit for Bone Raiders (or something else altogether), which comes from Kindred owned software provider Relax Gaming, vaguely blurring the lines between online slot and video game - very vague, we're being generous with the definitions here. It's also a slot which mixes respins and a rising multiplier in its base game before transitioning to coin accrual mode for the bonus phase, where a multiplying element once again plays a key role.

The Relax Gaming team must have been in a cute mood when it designed Bone Raiders' front end, which has a look reminiscent of Snake Arena, Mega Heist, and Marching Legions. For this one, players look down on the action as if riding on the back of a winged creature. What you can see from this height is a grid surrounded by moat, walls, and dry cracked earth. Trigger the bonus round, and the camera pans downwards to a more indoor, stone-encrusted location. It's all cutely done, from the neatly designed little objects littered about the place to the amiable skeleton characters.

Bone Raiders draws a clear distinction between its main game and its bonus round. For the main game, the action takes place on a 5x3 matrix, while in the bonus, it occurs on a 3x3 expandable up to 7x7 grid. In terms of volatility, you're looking at a medium-high volatile machine, while the max RTP when betting 10 c to $/€100 per spin is 96.1%.

In the base game, eight regular symbols land across the reels, there for the purpose of creating wins via a Pay Ways mechanic. The first 4 symbols on the list are diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades, turning out payouts of 0.3x the bet for 5 OAK. Next are four skeletal characters, worth 10 to 100 times the bet for a five-matching symbol win. There are no wild symbols in Bone Raiders, but a respin-rising multiplier combo makes up for the exclusion.

Bone Raiders: Slot Features

Bone Raiders beefs up its base game with the use of respins on each win, doubling the win multiplier in the process. Hit enough scatters or fork out a cash payment, and the bonus round with its coin accrual action activates.

Respin Multiplier

In the base game, any win triggers a respin and doubles the win multiplier. Respins continue like this until no more wins are awarded from a respin. All symbols drop off the reels for respins, not just non-winning spins. Each new spin always starts with an x1 multiplier.

Bonus Game

Landing 3 scatter symbols on reels 2, 3, and 4 triggers Bone Raiders' bonus round. The active space expands to a 7x7 grid, though only the centre 3x3 area is active at first. The rest of the area is made up of blockers. The triggering scatter symbols convert into feature symbols and play out their effects. Feature symbols target other positions according to their effect. If the targeted position contains a blocker, it is destroyed, becoming an active area where symbols may land. If the targeted position contains a coin, the coin's value is doubled. The feature starts with 2 spins, which reset whenever a feature symbol lands. Every 20 blockers destroyed increases the spin reset value by +1 spin. The feature symbols list is this:

• Magic Staff - targets one symbol 3 to 7 times.
• Bomb - targets the surrounding area, with the bomb sitting in the centre of a 3x3 to 7x7 sized area.
• Cannon - shoots a random number of targets from 1 area to all areas.
• Compass - targets a set pattern such. This could be row, column, diagonal, row + column, both diagonals.

After a feature symbol has performed its action, it transforms into a coin with 1x the bet value. It might be worth repeating that when feature symbols hit coins, their values double.

Feature Buy

Bone Raiders' bonus round can be bought from the feature buy for the cost of 70 times the base bet. The feature buy RTP is 96.5%.

Bone Raiders: Slot Verdict

Bone Raiders is a slot that feels both slightly old, though mainly new. The older parts are the respin feature, which has a Jack Hammer meets DoubleMax thing going on. However, Bone Raiders' respin system isn't exactly like either of those features, making it a quite unique combo that is worth a few spins to scope how it works. In short, it's a sweet feature which is able to meander, bob about, do little, or… maybe pop dramatically. Whatever the outcome, on the whole, its inclusion only adds to the main game, despite a possible drop in hit rate to compensate. The hit rate stats weren't on hand to verify this supposition, but Bone Raiders didn't seem to suffer from huge amounts of dead spins.

Players leave the base game mechanics far behind when triggering or buying their way into Bone Raiders' bonus round. This one's quite a bit different. Two spins are not a lot, huh? Meaning there isn't much room for error unless blocker demolition goes well. If so, it is possible to increase the reset spin amount to a maximum of 4, providing a tad more breathing space. During the review, smashing loads of blocks actually was not super difficult to achieve at all. Then, it's a matter of hitting as many feature symbols as possible, boosting and creating coin symbols. It's a system that's not difficult to imagine, in the right circumstances, feature symbols teaming up to hit coins, causing their values to quickly double up into something special. Possibly.

When Bone Raiders is doubling up like a nutter, it can theoretically reach as high as its 10,000x the bet win cap. It's a slot where you can visualise this potentially happening. Or not; we're talking about a fairly volatile Relax Gaming machine, so less-than-wow returns are a possibility as well. But stirring in the cute skeleton crew with a fun core base game feature and a multiplicative bonus round means a significant amount of raiding may be on the cards.