Aztec Princess: a 2015 coin-based game with a 1,000x ceiling
Aztec Princess was released on 14 December 2015, back when Play’n GO still built its machines around a coin system rather than a single stake amount. Three settings come into play: the number of active lines, from one to twenty; the coin value, from €0.01 to €0.25; and the bet level, from one to five coins per line. Multiply the three and you get the cost of a spin, from €0.01 at the absolute floor up to €25 at the top. With all twenty lines switched on and the smallest coin, a spin costs €0.20 — the configuration most players actually use. The grid runs five reels by three rows. The low-value symbols are playing cards carved into wood, ten through ace. Above them sits the jungle wildlife: a poison dart frog paying 250 coins for five, an eagle and a jaguar at 500, and a reptilian creature at 1,000. The golden shield serves as the wild. It replaces every symbol except the scatter and the bonus, and returns 50, 500 or 5,000 coins for three, four or five — a payout calculated on the line bet, not the total bet, a distinction that has caused a great deal of confusion in competing write-ups. The princess herself is the scatter. Three, four or five of her anywhere on the grid award fifteen, twenty and twenty-five free spins respectively. The quirk of the round is that she stops being merely a scatter and behaves as a second wild, which markedly increases how often combinations form. In exchange, no retrigger is possible; the counter runs down to zero and never climbs back, even if fresh princesses land. The third special symbol is a skull inlaid with precious stones. Three of them open the Aztec Temple Bonus, a fully separate pick-and-win scene. Mud-covered skulls roll across the temple floor in successive waves, and the player points at one per wave, three picks in all. The metal uncovered — bronze, silver, gold or diamond — and the number of matching pieces set the prize, which ranges from a few times the stake up to 1,000 times the total bet. That 1,000x figure is the game’s maximum win, or €25,000 at the €25 ceiling. There is no bonus buy, no gamble feature and no progressive jackpot, contrary to what a few poorly researched pages claim. The published return to player is 94.17% and volatility is rated medium, a profile that produces readable but rarely spectacular sessions.
