Alchemy Gold in detail
PG Soft builds most of its catalogue on ways-to-win and expanding grids. Alchemy Gold is the exception: released on 19 October 2022, it is a cluster pays game on a 5x5 grid, where a win forms as soon as five or more identical symbols touch each other, with no paylines and no reading direction. The studio's own spec sheet describes the engine as collapsing reels: 5 reels, 5 columns, base bet fixed at 10 credits.
A spin plays out in three beats. Winning clusters pay, the symbols involved are removed, and new ones drop in to fill the gaps. Every removal pushes the multiplier up by one: x1 on the first, x2 on the second, x3 on the third, and so on for as long as the cascade keeps going. In the base game that counter resets to x1 on the next spin. PG Soft states this plainly in its documentation, and it is the real ceiling of base play: you need a long sequence inside one single spin for the multiplier to matter at all.
Gold symbols are the second layer. Any symbol other than the wild and the scatter can land inside a gold frame. If it takes part in a paid cluster, it does not vanish with the rest: it turns into a wild for the remainder of the sequence. That is what revives cascades which looked dead, and therefore what drives the multiplier upward.
The free spins need 3 scatters and award 10 spins. Each extra scatter adds 2 more spins, and the feature can be retriggered. The change of regime is sharp: the multiplier is set back to x1 only once, when the bonus starts. After that it stacks from cascade to cascade and, crucially, from spin to spin, all the way to the end. A bonus that opens with three dry spins stays mediocre; one that chains two big cascades early moves into a completely different bracket.
PG Soft publishes an unusually precise breakdown here. Overall RTP of 96.78%, split into 67.97% from the base game and 28.81% from free spins: close to a third of the theoretical return is locked inside a feature that rarely fires. The overall hit rate is 25.77%, but only 0.48% for triggering the bonus, roughly one spin in two hundred. Volatility is rated medium by the studio, bets run from €0.20 to €200, the game is certified by Gaming Associates, and there is no bonus buy on the menu.
