Grail Maiden is a slot machine which gets inspiration for its theme from the famous Holy Grail, which was a quest for the King Arthur from Camelot. The search for the Holy Grail was important for them and it is at the center of the action from Grail Maiden as well. The game does have the medieval theme down, and you will find that the designers did an excellent job with this title. It also introduces a concept called All Pays, which doesn’t use standard paylines, and doesn’t quite use ways to win either, though that’s what it sounds like.
Despite having a typical setup with 5 reels, Grail Maiden doesn’t have a fixed number of paylines, instead relying on a system they called All Pays (more on it below). There are a lot of chances to get features activated, with wilds, bonus games, scatters or free spins among them, but that also means that the prizes are lower than usual, the top payout being at $4,000.
Features of Grail Maiden
The features of Grail Maiden consist in wild symbols, scatters and bonus games which give away free spins with expanding wilds.
One of the things that make this game special is the All Pays system. It’s similar to Ways to Win, but in Grail Maiden you don’t get a fixed number of chances, or at least they don’t mention any. The game simply takes into account the matching symbols that are on neighboring reels and starting from the left, and it doesn’t matter where on the reel they are located (while Ways to Win wants them to be touching). It’s like a game that has only scatter symbols in it, though somewhat limited ones.
The Holy Grail image was chosen to be the wild symbol. With the exception of the scatter, the Holy Grail wild substitutes for any other symbol. The great part is that it doesn’t have to be on a certain payline in order to assist with a new combo, it just has to be on the right reel. Wilds are allowed to appear on reels 2, 3 and 4.
The Grail Maiden Logo gets to behave like a scatter symbol, meaning that it can also appear anywhere on the reel, but at the same time it doesn’t have to start from the left like the other symbols do. Its payouts vary from 2x to 50x the wager, when you have 3 to 5 Logos present.
Grail Bonus Feature
The bonus game requires a certain combination of symbols of different kinds. You need either the King Arthur or Guinevere on the 1st reel, a wild Holy Grail on one or more reels in the middle (2, 3 or 4) and either Guinevere or Arthur on the 5th reel. Both Guinevere and Arthur need to be present on reels 1 and 5, but it doesn’t matter which of them appears on which reel.
The bonus game consists in 5 free spins. For the duration of these spins, you get sticky expanding wilds. The wild symbols that triggered the bonus game stay in place for the free spins and cover the entire reel, so up to three reels can be wild. You can retrigger the free spins once again, with another 5 spins awarded.
Betting options and jackpots
Even without having a fixed number of lines, the bets consider that you wager on the equivalent of 25 lines. You are allowed to use up to 4 coins on each one, with the maximum bet using 100 coins at $1 each ($100 total).
You’re only getting 1,000x the line bet in this slot, meaning up to 4,000 coins or $4,000.
Design and symbols
I quite enjoyed the design of Grail Maiden. The action takes place on the stained glass of a church, with each square being used to offer you another symbol. Every single character, object or playing card is designed to look like it was painted on the stained glass, and they all look great because of it. It’s one of the few times when I don’t care about playing cards being used, as they’ve integrated them very well on the reels.
Symbols: Holy Grail (wild), Game Logo (scatter, 50x the wager), Grail Maiden (1,000x), King Arthur (750x), White Horse (750x), Tower (500x), Ace (250x), King (150x), Queen (150x), Jack (150x), 10 (100x) and 9 (100x).
Is It Worth Playing?
The All Pays system alone is a great reason to play at least a few spins in this game. You win often enough, you get plenty of features, but the downside is the lower value payouts.
The Grail Maiden slot machine is offered through the Wager Gaming platform, so if you want to play it for real or just to practice, look out for casinos that use it.
