High Noon Duel: the bar that decides which gunfighter you get
Along the top edge of the carved frame, above the first row of symbols, sits a bar divided into segments and coloured from one end to the other. It is there on every paid spin and it is the only part of base play that remembers anything. Everything else on the board resolves and clears; the bar keeps score.
What it is keeping score of is the standoff. Pistol Belle and the Iron Cowboy each have a scatter symbol, and each of those symbols pushes the bar towards the other side when it lands. The side that runs out first loses the duel, and the winner's own bonus is what the player receives.
The bar as it appears over the board during base play, with the two colours meeting part way along it and a pair of revolver scatters landed on the upper rows.
What the bar does
A race rather than a counter
Most slots that collect something towards a bonus collect it in one direction: three scatters, four scatters, five, and the round opens. The duel does not work that way. There are two collectors here and they undo each other's progress, so a long run of Belle scatters followed by a long run of Cowboy scatters can end roughly where it began. The display is a tug of war with a middle, not a meter with a top.
The practical effect is that the bar is informative in a way a plain counter is not. A player looking at it can see not only how close a bonus is but which bonus is close, and those two bonuses are not interchangeable — one scatters single wilds across the grid and the other drops a solid block. Knowing which way the bar is leaning is knowing what kind of round is coming.
What the winner receives
Whichever gunfighter prevails, the award is eight free spins with their own mechanic firing at the start of every one of them. Belle's eight put a handful of wilds on the board each spin. The Cowboy's eight put one large square wild on the board each spin. The counts are not an estimate: they are printed on the game's own bonus panel, which lists both character formats at eight spins and the Special format at nine.
The trade report that covered the release adds a detail our own record does not carry, and it is the one that explains why these rounds are worth reaching: the multiplier that climbs with each chained win does not reset between the spins of a bonus. In base play it starts again every time the reels turn. Inside a bonus it keeps climbing for the whole eight or nine. That is attributed here because it is their statement rather than something read off a screen in this office.
The two boost options and what they cost the bar
The game sells two ways of reaching a bonus sooner without buying one outright. Bet Boost raises the base bet and roughly doubles the chance of triggering; Super Bet Boost raises it a great deal further and increases that chance around twenty-two fold. On the recorded panel, at the stake shown there, the first is priced at 2.80 against a 2.00 stake and the second at 20.00.
The part worth knowing is the footnote attached to them. Wins are still calculated on the original base bet rather than the boosted one, and switching either option on part way through a session resets the progress the bar has already made. A player who has spent twenty spins pushing the Cowboy towards the edge and then reaches for a boost hands that progress back. Both of those qualifications come from the trade report that covered the release, not from this site.
Where the duel ends and the bonus begins
Once a format opens, the bar's job is over for the duration. Inside the round the character is fixed — Belle's eight spins are Belle's, start to finish — with the one exception of the Special format, which reopens the question at the top of every spin and answers it at random. That is the only place in the game where both gunfighters can appear inside a single round, and it is the reason the Special entry on the bonus panel is priced so far above the other two.
Questions about the duel display
- What does the bar above the reels track?
- The standing of the two gunfighters against each other. Every character scatter that lands moves it, and the direction depends on whose scatter it was.
- What happens when one side runs out?
- That character wins the duel and their own free spins format opens — eight spins with their mechanic active on every one of them.
- Does the bar carry over between paid spins?
- It is a base-game display, and it is what the two boost options reset if either is switched on part way through a session.
- Is there a third outcome?
- Yes. The nine-spin Special format exists alongside the two character bonuses and picks one of their mechanics at random at the start of each of its spins.