8 Dragons: five dragons, five different bonuses
8 Dragons was released in June 2017 and belongs to the long line of Asian-themed machines in the Pragmatic Play catalogue. The grid runs five reels by three rows, crossed by twenty paylines. The stake range spans 0.20 € to 100 € per spin, and the official return figure is 96.37%, published by the supplier on its own product sheet. The base game rests on two complementary ideas. The first is the mystery stacked symbol system: on any spin, every reel can fill with the same paying symbol, whichever it happens to be. That produces very readable screens, where the outcome can be read before the reels settle. The second concerns the dragons, which never arrive alone: they always come stacked in groups of two, and when they enter a winning combination they double its value. On top of that, stacked wilds land on reels 2, 3 and 4 in the base game and likewise double the combinations they complete. The red envelope serves as the scatter symbol. Three or more envelopes open the free spins round, and this is where the title sets itself apart. Rather than awarding a fixed batch, the game presents five dragons and lets the player decide. The pink dragon grants five spins, with a multiplier that can reach 15x. The purple grants eight, with the multiplier capped at 10x. The green climbs to fifteen spins but drops back to 6x. The blue offers twenty spins, the longest run, against a multiplier limited to 4x. The orange dragon, finally, conceals both the spin count and the multiplier value. During the round, it is the stacked dragons that carry the multiplier, drawn at random from the range matching the chosen option. One detail changes a great deal: the feature can retrigger with no announced limit, and each retrigger awards the same number of spins as the option chosen at the start. The opening choice therefore does not commit only the first series, it sets the rhythm of the entire bonus. Twenty spins reloading in twenties behave nothing like five spins reloading in fives. One documentation point deserves flagging. The official Pragmatic Play sheet states that during free spins the stacked dragons carry a random multiplier that can reach 30x, depending on the choice made. Yet the grid of five options as documented tops out at 15x, on the pink dragon. The gap logically points to the orange dragon, whose values are not published, but the studio confirms this nowhere. The game offers no bonus buy, and the supplier publishes no win ceiling. The values recorded in the specialist databases do not corroborate one another on this point.
