Beat the Beast: Kraken’s Lair

Two Golden Squid lines in round 1315 paid EUR 18.00, and then a single Kraken Emblem on the same screen expanded the squid over three positions and all nine paylines paid again for EUR 171.50 on top. The three Emblems that caused it also paid EUR 2.00 as Scatters and opened ten free spins worth EUR 105.00, so the round closed at 296.5x the EUR 1.00 stake, the best of the test.

Expansions did most of the paying everywhere else too. Across the 10,000 ordinary rounds 451 expansions added EUR 2,936.50, 33.0% of every payout in the series, and inside the 58 natural features 411 expansions added EUR 2,218.50, 73.9% of the EUR 3,001.50 those features returned. Queens expanded most often, 47 times for EUR 397.50, while the Kraken itself expanded 31 times for EUR 396.00; the largest feature expansion was a Queen over four positions in round 1988, EUR 82.50 on nine lines.

The features themselves were short. Fifty-one of the 58 stopped at their ten spins, six took one retrigger to twenty, and only round 9510 strung four retriggers into fifty spins, returning EUR 256.00 from its free spins alone. The free-spins money averaged 51.75x the stake per feature with a median of 36.25x, and one free spin, the sixth of round 7591, paid EUR 125.00 by itself.

The price of those swings was a long stretch of nothing. Payouts of zero filled 7,631 of the 10,000 rounds, an Emblem sat on 2,118 opening screens and on 1,417 of them completed no line and expanded nothing, and the demo balance ended at EUR 3,889.50 from EUR 5,000.00. The approximate 95% CI for the series mean runs from 74.07% to 103.72%, which is how much room a 10,000-round sample of a game this swingy leaves open.