High Noon Duel free spins: two rounds of eight and one of nine

The game's bonus selection panel on a recorded screen, with five entries rather than three: two boosts, the two character formats at eight spins each, and the nine-spin Special format on the right.

Pistol Belle Free Spins

Eight spins, with Belle's feature firing at the start of each of them. She fans her revolver across the frame and leaves wild positions scattered where the shots land. The trade report that covered the release puts the number she places at two to four per spin, which is their figure rather than one counted here; what the recorded screens show plainly is that the wilds arrive as separate positions rather than as one shape.

Separate positions suit a board judged across touching reels. Two wilds dropped three columns apart can rescue two different chains on the same spin, where one large shape in the same two places would be impossible. Belle's round is the broad one.

Iron Cowboy Free Spins

Also eight spins, also with the mechanic firing every time, but the Cowboy deals in bulk. He levels a heavy gun at the reels and carves out a solid square of wild positions in one go. Our own earlier record of this game describes that block as 2x2, which is the size visible on the recorded screens. The trade report that covered the release goes further and says the block can be 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 depending on the round — a larger claim, from them and not from us, and worth knowing because a reader will meet it.

A square that covers two columns at once is doing something a scattered wild cannot: it joins neighbouring reels in two rows simultaneously, which on an adjacent-reel board is exactly the join that extends a chain. Where Belle's round is broad, the Cowboy's is deep.

Special Free Spins

Nine spins, and the only format in the game where both gunfighters can appear. At the start of each spin one of the two mechanics is chosen at random and runs; the next spin chooses again. Over nine spins a player may get mostly scattered wilds, mostly blocks, or a mixture, and there is no way to steer it.

The price on the panel says what the game thinks of that. At the stake shown there, a character format costs 230.00 and the Special format 600.00 — well over double for one extra spin. The extra spin is not what is being paid for. The variety is, and so is the chance that the mechanic drawn on any given spin happens to be the one the board needed.

The award screen that opens a character round, with the spin count shown as a single large figure before the first spin is taken.

What carries through a round

The thing that makes eight spins here unlike eight spins elsewhere is the multiplier. Every chained win raises it, and the trade report that covered the release states that inside a bonus it does not fall back between spins — it keeps whatever it has reached until the format ends. Attributed, because it is their statement and not something a still screen can prove.

If that holds, the shape of a good round is easy to picture: early spins build the figure, late spins cash it, and the wild mechanic firing on every single spin is what keeps chains available long enough for that to happen. It also explains why the two character rounds are the same length. Eight is long enough for the figure to matter and short enough that it usually will not run away.

The two entries that are not rounds

The panel's first two cards are easy to misread as cheap bonuses. They are not. Bet Boost raises the base bet and roughly doubles the chance a bonus turns up on its own; Super Bet Boost raises it a great deal more and lifts that chance around twenty-two fold. Neither hands over a round. At the recorded stake they cost 2.80 and 20.00, and the panel states the first raises the base bet by 1.40.

Two things go with them, both from the trade report that covered the release: wins are still calculated on the unboosted bet, and switching either on mid-session resets whatever progress the duel bar has made. Whether any of these five entries is offered at all depends on where the account is registered, which is the operator's and the regulator's business rather than the studio's.