Dragon’s Playground: Slot Overview
It’s been said that you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat in New York City, and in the online slots business, you’re never more than, say, 7 or 8 feet away from a dragon game. Okay, that dragon ‘stat’ is a made-up number, but dragons are a popular entity, commonly found in slots, often appearing in traditional Asian-themed games since they possess a major cultural significance. Dragon’s Playground from developer NetEnt isn’t one of those sorts of slots. Instead, it makes its home amongst the fantasy dragon trope, breathing Avalanches, wild transformations, Cycle Rounds, as well as free spins into participating draco fans’ lives.
Two dragons drape themselves about Dragon’s Playground’s screen, a red-scaled one on the left and a green one to the right. The dragons aren’t only for show, as they interact with the gaming grid every so often, and flames play an important role in general. Dragon’s Playground’s base game unfolds in batches of 10 spins, where the final spin of a cycle triggers a wild symbol conversion feature. A spin count on the top right corner of the gaming grid helps gamblers keep track of the cycle’s progress. With a cartoon style and a helpful dragon duo, Dragon’s Playground rustles up a good amount of cosy warmth to invite players in for a go.
To actually have a go of trying your luck in Dragon’s Playground, you’ll need to pick a stake, and the range on offer here varies from a low of 10 c to a high of $/€10 per paid game round. Wedged between the two on-screen wyverns is a 6-reel, 4-row play area, which supplies no less than 4,096 ways to win, requiring all wins to start from the leftmost reel. Further statistics include gamblers getting a maximum RTP of 96% and a medium-high volatile math model to go with it.
Fantasy items such as shields, rings, crowns, and treasure chests (poking tongues) are Dragon’s Playground’s high pays. Its low pays are common 10-A card royals. Should you manage to hit a 6 OAK high pay combination, the reward is 3 to 10 times the bet, dropping to 1x-2.5x for a low pay 6-of-a-kind win. Wild symbols only appear on the reels from Cycle Rounds or Dragon’s Breath features, substituting for all symbols except the scatter.
Dragon’s Playground: Slot Features
Dragon’s Playground’s features begin with Avalanches, aka a tumbling, cascading win mechanic. As per usual, symbols in winning combinations disappear, making way on the reels for other symbols to avalanche down to replace them, bringing in new symbols up top as needs be. Avalanches repeat in this manner until a win no longer appears.
Flames
Pay symbols may appear with a flame attached to them. Symbols with flames that are destroyed form a frame at their position. If their position is already framed, a frame is added to a random position.
Cycle Rounds
Spins in the base game are played in cycles of 10. On the 10th spin of a cycle, all framed positions transform into wild symbols.
Dragon’s Breath
The dragons can randomly activate to add wild symbols to the reels. This can occur on any spin except the tenth spin in a Cycle Round.
Free Spins
Getting 3 scatter symbols on the reels in the base game awards 10 free spins plus 4 free spins for each extra scatter in view. In the free spins session, landing 3 scatter symbols awards +5 additional free spins, plus 2 free spins for each extra scatter on the grid. During the feature, on each free spin, when the Avalanche feature ends, all remaining flames are removed, and formed frames in the current spin transform into wilds. A winning way of 6 wilds awards 10x the bet.
Dragon’s Playground: Slot Verdict
Dragon’s Playground was a slot that was as cute to play as it was to look at. It’s one of those games where not much about it is especially innovative, but any lack of mechanical originality didn’t feel like a major issue. A cosy fantasy gaming environment pulls you in, and rotations of the Cycle Rounds feature play their part in holding attention. A simple set of rules makes Dragon’s Playground easy to learn, quite well-paced, and only adds to the replayability instead of detracting from it.
Cycle Round-style slots appear every so often; NetEnt’s Babylon Riches and Red Tiger‘s Buffalo Collector are two contemporaries, and dropping wilds at the end of a cycle is an oft-seen move. This approach makes sticking around for the next 10 spins compelling since, who knows, maybe this cycle is the one that gets smothered in marked positions. Upping the anticipation is the fact Dragon’s Playground has thousands of ways to win in place of a reduced number of paylines, so, in theory, it doesn’t take a huge number of wild symbols on the grid to link winning combinations together. This can happen both at the end of Cycle Round or when dragons blast the reels. Or, at the end of free spins. It’s a simple yet sweet system that is able to smoulder its way to 10,000x the bet when the flames are appropriately fanned.
It’s always nice to get a game from NetEnt which wraps an amiable personality around a warm inner core rather than disgorging a painful travesty that sullies the developer’s hard-won reputation. Dragon’s Playground was one of the studio’s positive releases, which, while offering little in the way of white-hot, unmissable avant-garde action, was simply fun to play.
Good
Dragon’s Playground delivers a blast of feel-good warmth, and not all of it comes from its fire-breathing characters.
