The Grand Galore Slot Machine – Free Play & Review

With a game design that’s heavy on gemstones and Royals, there isn’t much left for the slot’s own theme to shine through. And yet, you do get the feel that you’re looking at a movie awards ceremony, with a golden feline statue as one of the top symbols.

Add the glamorous background picture, looking like a moving curtain of lights, and the effect is complete. Ultimately, ELK Studios doesn’t have the most elaborate or interesting design here, they’ve offered much better in the past, and yet they’ve managed to make it look elegant.

Developer

Established in 2012, ELK Studios is a Swedish company, and one that has made its mark in the online casino industry. Some of their best slot machines so far include titles like Wild Toro, Taco Brothers, Electric SAM or The Lab, to mention just a few.

How To Play It

Using 100 coins at all times, the betting range of this game is between $0.20 and $100, the standard for all ELK titles I’ve seen so far. Betting strategies are also available, another common option in ELK slots, which allows the wager to change automatically.

It’s a game with 6×4 reels, using expanding reels that can end up offering up to 1,000,000 ways to win. You start off with only 4096 ways to win, though that’s still enough to get you some very good rewards, if you’re lucky. To create a combo, you need matching symbols on 3 or more consecutive reels, starting from the leftmost column.

Special Features

The biggest mechanic to talk about in The Grand Galore is the expanding reel system. It starts off as a slot with 6×4 reels, which get 4096 ways to win on them. As you form winning combinations, the reels which have those symbols are going to be expanded by one row.

A respin will follow, involving the winning positions and the new symbols. If new wins form as a result, then the reel expansion occurs again, and there are more ways to win and symbols added. As you can get up to 10 rows of symbols and on all 6 reels, there is the potential to get up to 1,000,000 ways to win eventually.

That would require quite a few respins with 6-symbol combinations though, and obviously it’s not going to be very likely to happen.

If there are stacked symbols which are included in a respin, they end up showing the same symbol in all positions.

Another feature that could trigger, is the Synced Respin. It involves between 2 and 5 reels which are next to each other, picked at random to go through a respin with expanding reels. They will all stop on the same symbol.

10 to 25 free spins can also be triggered, provided that 3 to 6 bonus symbols land scattered in view first. The feature can also be retriggered.

Grand Synced Respins are guaranteed to happen after every 5 wins that you get during free spins. As you keep getting this feature, the number of synced reels goes up each time, from the initial 2, up to 5 synced reels. The reels will expand in size as well, for different columns, until they are all at the maximum size, with 10 symbols each.

Maximum Payouts

The slot’s rewards are excellent, going even up to $1,000,000 (10,000x the stake), but considering that you could get up to 1,000,000 ways to win/combinations, there are some heavy limits placed there. The cap is lower than in plenty of other high volatility slots, but the RTP is at the expected level, of 96%.

Summary

You get a good mix of features here, so you’re not likely to want to walk away immediately. At the same time, the slot’s high volatility will make it an unlikely choice for a beginner.