The Falcon Huntress

The falconers were a group of specialized soldiers and scouts who could use large birds of prey to do scouting expeditions and to communicate over long distances. The Falcon Huntress slot, available at Thunderkick casinos, is about a woman who hunts with this type of bird, and it incorporates a North Asian theme into the process, which uses the time of imagery typically associated with Mongols like Genghis Khan. The pay table in this slot is particularly generous, and all of the wins are based on a multiple of how much you've wagered on each spin.

Format and Layout

This is a nine-payline video slot. There is a grid of five vertical reels and three horizontal rows, and the lines only pay from left to right. You'll see from the features that this does not tell the whole story on the number of ways to win in this game and what the prizes will be like.

Betting is also less-than-typical since it's not based on wagers on each line. Instead, the minimum bet size is $0.10 per turn, and you can make that worth up to $100 per spin. Because all of the wins and payouts are multiplied by your bet size as a whole, you don't have to worry about the difference between the nine paylines and the wagers that are based on even denominations of ten.

Falcon Wild Symbol

The falcon appears with a golden square around it, and it's the wild in this slot. It shows up on each reel without exception, and five of a kind gives you a payout of 200x. However, this is not the single-largest payout in the game (though it's close). You'll also have wins of 20x and 2x for four of a kind and three of a kind, respectively, that are available with this wild.

We should note that the wild wins are scattered, so they don't have to be on the same payline to give you the prizes. That makes them work significantly more than you might initially expect.

Expanding Wins Feature

Virtually everyone who has played online slots of some type have seen expanding symbols in some form, usually as a wild that covers a whole reel. In this game, however, they take on a life of their own with the expanding wins feature. At random, you'll have the symbols that make up a winning combination expand to cover their entire respective reels, and this will give you the same payout on every possible payline. This is similar to a 9x multiplier for single-line pays, and it's a cool way to get extra value from the expansion motif.

Free Spins Feature

If you get at least three wilds on the reels, no matter where they show up, you'll be given a free spins feature. You'll get 10 free spins during this feature, and every single one of them that get a non-scatter payout will activate the expanding symbols feature.

Important Combinations and Prizes

Five of a kind of the huntress herself awards you with a win worth 500x. You can make that 100x for five of the stitched red falcon symbol, and it drops down to 75x for five of the stitched egg. The stitched feather in purple is worth a 50x prize. All four of these symbols pay out for just two of a kind or more, so the volatility is helped significantly by the increased hit-rate for these symbols.

Five lower-level symbols use embroidered card ranks on sections of brown cloth in different colors. The font fits the theme of the game as well with Asian influences. The red A pays out 15x for five of a kind. When you line up five of the yellow K on a line, you'll get a 12.5x win. Pays of 10x round out the lower end of the overall pay schedule for five-of-a-kind combinations of the purple Q, the green J or the blue 10.

Overview

Thunderkick has done a pretty good job with using a theme that's off of the beaten path, and we can't really think of any other game that has a concept quite like The Falcon Huntress. Along these lines, they also made it so that the gameplay was different than most with the expanding symbols feature, which becomes even more important in the free spins bonus round. It's things like this that show their willingness and eagerness to step outside of the box that make games like this one so interesting.