Gold Beard (3Win8): how the pirate Wild, coin Scatter and 24 free games work

Goldbeard is a cartoon pirate slot on the 3Win8 lobby: parrots, treasure chests, gold coins and big curly card letters on a tropical-beach frame. The whole game revolves around one character, the purple-hatted Goldbeard, who only turns up on the two outside reels.

The screen

The Goldbeard logo sits under three jackpot meters: MINOR (800.00), RANDOM JACKPOT (around 10950 when we played) and MAJOR (1300.00). Twenty line tabs run down both sides in different colours. Along the bottom: LINE with down and up arrows, BET with its own arrows, a BET/WIN readout, AUTO and SPIN.

The regular symbols are a parrot, a treasure chest, barrels, the gold coin and the card ranks 9, 10, J, Q and K.

The Goldbeard Wild

The help screen spells out three rules:

• Goldbeard only appears on reels 1 and 5 in normal games.
• He substitutes for every symbol except the Scatter.
• Any winning line that includes at least one Goldbeard pays double.

Because he sits on the end reels only, he can finish a line started on reels 2 to 4 but never sits in the middle of one during the base game.

Free games, step by step

1. Land at least one Goldbeard on reel 1 and one on reel 5 in the same spin.
2. Each Goldbeard on screen then reveals 2, 3 or 4 free games. The panel headline says you can win up to 24.
3. During the free games Goldbeard can also land on reel 3, and another pair on reels 1 and 5 reveals extra games.
4. All wins during the feature are tripled, and the games are played at the lines and bet of the spin that triggered them.

Combine the tripling with the Wild's doubling and a Goldbeard line in free games pays six times its base value. That combination is where the game's larger results come from.

The gold coin Scatter

The coin pays anywhere on the reels, multiplied by the total bet: 2 coins pay 1x, 3 pay 5x, 4 pay 20x and 5 pay 100x.

This spin ran 5 lines at 0.05 (0.25 total) and returned 0.50, with line 4 showing 0.20 of that. Notice the gold coin on reel 2: one on its own pays nothing, since the Scatter needs two.

A note on bet size

The free games are played at whatever bet triggered them, so a spin at a lower line count triggers the same feature but at a smaller stake. If you want the most out of a trigger, play all 20 lines at a low line bet (0.01 per line is 0.20 a spin) instead of a few lines at a high bet.

Other slots from this lobby are on the 3Win8 overview, and a different take on pirates is Captain's Treasure on Joker123. To play Goldbeard, ask for a 3Win8 login.