Golden Goose - Genies Gems

This is the second game in the Golden Goose series of games, Genie's Gems, one step moving on from Chameleons to Genies. Everything remains identical to the original game, both in the paytable and in the game symbols used, but with an additional feature of 4 Golden Goose Bonus games, with a correspondingly 25% increase in the minimum starting bet per spin, from $0.20 to $0.25. Any player can opt not to play with this Golden Goose Bet feature, but in doing so, might as well play the original Genie's Gems game in the first place.

A quick run-through of the paytable: The handsome smiling Genie is the Wild symbol, paying 8000x the line bet for 5 of him, and tripling all wins with it, which is very good. The Scatter symbol pays 400x the total bet amount for 5 of them, which is also very good. All the other symbols pay from 1500x the line bet (Diamond symbol) down to 100x the line bet (10 symbol), which is average. There are no other features in the basic game if the Golden Goose Bet feature is not chosen, so like it or not, the Golden Goose Bet option has to be activated and played.

Comparing this game with the Crazy Chameleon game, Genie's Gems has a much better paytable, with higher win values, and so should fall into a higher variance category than Crazy Chameleon. Comparisons aside, playing this Genie's Gems was not as much fun as the Crazy Chameleon, simply due to the slightly higher variance. The better win values certainly affects the way the game plays and pays, and definitely not to my liking so far. There tend to be too many empty non-paying spins, those spins that paid tend to give small insignificant amounts, and the third Scatter symbol tend to be more difficult to get.

I am particularly disappointed with the payouts from all of the 4 Golden Goose Bonus games. None of them lived up to my expectations. I was hoping that the Free Spins game, with its 3x multiplier, could and would give out some decent wins, but the best I got was only 26x my bet amount. All the other 3 Bonus games paid below 10x my bet, and that sucks big time!