The Golden Age of Piracy hovered around the 17th to the early part of the 18th century and focused on places like the warm yet, at times, stormy Caribbean seas. Using the powers of deduction, or induction, this appears to be the setting for Pragmatic Play's buccaneering slot Pirate Golden Age. A simple game, Pirate Golden Age comes with nothing special in its base game, but it does have a bonus round where mystery symbols are slung onto the reels and collected.
Pirate Golden Age is played on a 5-reel, 4-row game grid with 20 fixed paylines. The background image is an outrageously exotic scene of steep mountains careening down into light green-blue water, with a scary skull thing on the right-hand side above scuttling crabs. It's all rather pleasant and got the game off to a promising start. Sadly, the initial goodwill disappeared faster than a swab's sobriety on their day off.
>Playable on mobile, tablet, or desktop devices, Pirate Golden Age, takes bets from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin. It's a highly volatile voyage, so brace for anything. As is common practice with Pragmatic Play, the game comes in three RTP settings, with 96.49% being the highest. Regular wins occur in Pirate Golden Age when matching symbols land across paylines, starting from the leftmost side, and there are 10 regular pay symbols to work with.
Starting with the lows first, where we find J-A card royals, then come higher value tiles such as a bomb, an anchor, a parrot, and three pirate characters as the top-paying symbols. Royals pay 1.5-3x the bet for five of a kind, while the rest pay 6.25x to 75x the bet for a five-symbol winning line. The skeleton in the pirate hat is the game's wild, landing on any reels to substitute for all symbols except the bonus symbol. If wilds make winning lines of themselves, they are worth up to 75x the bet for a line of five.
>Pirate Golden Age does not have any extra in the base game, but it has a free spins bonus round, triggered when 3 or more bonus symbols appear in view. Landing exactly 3, 4, or 5 bonus symbols pays 2x, 20x, or 200x the bet, as well as the awarded free spins.
In free spins, a golden skull festooned mystery symbol appears. When mystery symbols land, they all transform into the same type of pay symbols or into wilds. After a spin, all mystery symbols are collected by a meter. At the end of each free spin, the number of collected mystery symbols is added back to the screen in random positions – new mystery symbols can still land. If more than one mystery symbol ends up in the same position, the mystery symbol in that cell gets a multiplier. The multiplier is equal to the number of mystery symbols on the cell. Multipliers apply to all wins running through it, and if more than one wild multiplier is part of a win, the values are added before being used. Lastly, for every 5 mystery symbols collected by the meter, players randomly win an extra 1, 2, or 3 free spins.
>Pirate slots, you know, they're not exactly uncommon, so it takes something special to help them pop. Slots like Relax Gaming's Dead Man's Trail stick out like a sore thumb for their innovation and build quality, blending gaming elements with the salty theme like a slot-based ode to the sea. Or something like that. Games like Pirate Golden Age stick out for other reasons. How to put this nicely? Pirate Golden Age was kinda dull. The base game felt dryer than a pirate captain's mouth after a hard night on the rum, while free spins weren't a whole lot better. Apologies for the hyperbole.
Let's dig deep for some positives to balance things out. It's tough. Pirate Golden Age is just so mediocre. Even the music got annoying. At times, it felt like it was being played by a drunk accordion player in the act of falling over. Then again, maybe in another slot the tunes would be outstanding but were tainted by Pirate Golden Age's average gameplay. There are other quirks as well, such as the collection feature which seems rather pointless - why collect the coins and then add them back on every single spin? Surely they could just have been shuffled around on the board instead whilst extra spins could be added after a set number of collected coins?
Oh yeah, the positives, well, the scenery is pretty, and the game is rather piratey. Players who simply cannot get enough swashbuckling in their lives might find entertainment value with all those brigands, bombs, and bones scattered around. Mystery symbol enthusiasts (is there such a thing?) might also be all over the free spins bonus round, which wasn't super difficult to trigger. It's not a massive paying slot, however, with max win capabilities of 3,000x the bet. In other words, hitting the win cap isn't exactly sacking Portobello while the Silver Train is in town.
To be fair, free spins occasionally went okay, and some players might be down with Pirate Golden Age's simplicity. There just isn't much to it, and it felt underpowered and incomplete as if something was missing that might have added extra pep. Or just pep in general. Let's end with a bit more hyperbole. Imagine raising money for a voyage to the Spanish Main, rounding up a motley crew, and crossing the Atlantic; a tattered map clutched firmly in hand. Then, digging up a treasure chest only to find it's empty. That disappointingly empty feeling isn't a jillion miles away from the one experienced once the Pirate Golden Age session was done.
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