Game: Wu Wang Zhe
Manufacturer: IGT
Advantage play potential: Medium
What Makes it Special: Symbols turn to Scatter Pays for three spins when three orbs collected; persistent state reels on each bet level
IGT has been finding various ways to explore persistent state games, and Wu Wang Zhe takes a different approach than many of the others. While collecting symbols is still the goal, you’re not getting wilds, but scatter pays, which offers a more unique experience.
Today we’ll look at the Advantage Play opportunity of Wu Wang Zhe, and how to spot it.
Understanding the Game
The game is a 5×4 reel set-up with 50 lines. Doors appear on reels 2-5 as a double-tall symbol and serve as a wild to any of the standard pay symbols.
On any spin Treasure Tokens can land, color coded and pertaining to one of five characters in the game. Each reel has Treasure Tokens related to one character. At any point should three Treasure Token be collected for a character, a three-spin countdown will be initiated.
During those three spins, should the character appear on the reels, a scatter pay occurs for each symbol present on the screen. Given each symbol pays a set amount, and you can have multiple scatter symbols active at the same time, they can add up quickly. Red is the most valuable, and yellow is the least, going from top to bottom on the left side of the screen. That is also the sequence the Treasure Tokens appear on the reels (Red in reel 1, through Yellow in reel 5).
The frequency of a Treasure Token landing seems more difficult than getting the symbols to appear for games where wild reels can be initiated, like seen on many other of IGT’s games. The tougher nature of the game may be attractive to those who like high risk, high reward style games. That said, it wasn’t hugely difficult, just not as frequent.
Like many IGT games with persistent state reels, there’s multiple bet levels, and multiple denominations. Five bet levels each have their own persistent states, and three denominations on the games I saw mean 15 different states on one machine.
Free Spins Bonus
The Free Spins bonus can be triggered by landing three gongs, one each on reels 2, 3 and 4. 10 free spins are initiated. The Scatter pay feature is also available in the bonus. If you have a scatter active and trigger the bonus, the scatter is active for the entire bonus.
If you collect three Treasure Tokens during the bonus and activate a scatter, it, too, remains for the rest of the bonus. What you had collected in the base game carries into the bonus, so triggering a bonus with a lot of two orb characters could also be a helpful scenario.
As such, collecting a lot of Treasure Tokens in the bonus, or entering the bonus with a lot of active scatters, can be a very lucrative arrangement.
While 10 base spins are awarded, additional free spins can be collected during the bonus, up to a cap of 100 total spins.
Understanding the Advantage
In this case the ability to collect Treasure Tokens and the persistent state on each bet level and denomination open up the opportunities for Advantage Play.
- Active Scatters: If you find active scatters that aren’t played out, that’s an immediate advantage because you’re guaranteed pays for each symbol that appears for however many spins the scatter remains active.
- Captured Treasure Tokens: The more Treasure Tokens present, the closer you are to scatter pays. So a lot of higher paying characters with two Treasure Tokens will be more advantageous than 1-2 low paying characters having one and that’s it.
Unlike some more straightforward games such as Scarab, you don’t know how many spins it might take to capture a Treasure Token. So having guaranteed scatter spins or having a lot of two-token characters are your best opportunities.
Watch and Learn
Check out RandomSlots‘ video on the game, which includes pay table information as well as a bonus!
Have you played Wu Wang Zhe? How did you do? Share your experiences in the comments!
