High Noon Duel wilds: three shapes doing three different jobs

Two Lady in Black symbols standing in the same row on a recorded screen, with the positions between them turned into gold wild chests and a further chest converted on the row below.

Scattered positions reach across the board

Belle's method is the broad one. Her feature places a number of individual wild positions wherever the shots land, and because they are separate they can land in columns that are nowhere near each other. On a six-column board that is the only way one feature can serve two unrelated chains at once — a wild on reel two finishing one combination while a wild on reel five extends another.

How many she places per spin is a figure the trade report that covered the release gives as two to four. That is their number and it is marked as theirs; what the recorded screens show without needing anyone's word for it is that the positions arrive separately rather than as one connected shape.

One block covers four positions at once

The Cowboy does the opposite. His gun carves out a solid square of wild positions in a single stroke, and because the square spans two columns and two rows it joins neighbouring reels in two places simultaneously. On an adjacent-reel board that double join is the most valuable thing a wild can do, because it is exactly the gap that stops a chain reaching the next column.

Our own earlier record of the game describes the block as 2x2, which is the size visible on the recorded screens. The trade report that covered the release says it can be 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 depending on the round. Those are not the same claim, and this site is not in a position to settle it: a bigger block has not been seen here. The outside version is set out because a reader will meet it, and it is attributed so nobody mistakes it for something measured on these pages.

Aligned symbols convert the space between them

The third mechanic needs no gunfighter. Two Lady in Black symbols landing in line with each other — along a row or down a column — turn every symbol standing between them into a wild. The conversion is a straight run, so it produces a shape neither of the other two can: a continuous bridge of arbitrary length, as long as the pair that defines it.

The picture above is that mechanic caught mid-round. Two Ladies stand in the same row with gold chests filling the positions between them, and the chests are ordinary wilds from that point on — they tumble away with any combination they help to form, and the gaps are refilled like any others.

Why one game needs three of them

A broken chain fails for one of three reasons. It needs one position in a particular column, and a scattered wild supplies that. It needs two columns joined across two rows, and a block supplies that. Or it needs a continuous run through several columns, and the Lady's conversion supplies that. Three failures, three tools, which is a tidier design than it looks from a list of features.

It also explains the Special bonus. Nine spins that draw one of the two character mechanics at random are nine chances that the tool which arrives happens to be the one the board needed. Over a round of that length a player gets some of both, which is a different proposition from eight spins of the same answer however good that answer is.