Lions Dance

Lions Dance Slot Review

Two purple-and-silver lion heads lean in from either side of a temple courtyard, mouths open and ribbons trailing, pagoda roofs fading into a pale sky behind the reels. Lions Dance doesn’t have a bonus feature so much as five of them fighting for the reels, and that abundance is either its whole appeal or its whole problem depending on your taste. Eurasian Gaming built it on a 5×4 grid with 40 paylines and a total RTP of 96.18%, paying left to right across numbered win patterns.

Few 40-line games bother to change what the reels are doing this often, and it’s the reason to give this one a spin rather than the festival dressing. Whether five modifiers can each pull enough weight is what the rest of this sets out to answer.

How Lions Dance Pays

Forty numbered lines cross the 5×4 grid, and any symbol matching one of those patterns from the leftmost reel pays out. Only the highest combination on each line counts, so a spin can score on several lines at once without double-counting the same symbols. It’s a conventional setup, and the game doesn’t dress it up as anything else.

The paytable splits into five themed symbols and four royals, with the Red Pouch out in front:

• Red Pouch – 1.9x, 4.7x, 22.2x for three, four, five
• Gold Coin – 1.3x, 2.2x, 4.7x
• Red Lantern – 0.9x, 1.2x, 3.5x
• A – 0.3x, 0.8x, 1.5x
• K – 0.3x, 0.6x, 1.2x
• Q – 0.2x, 0.5x, 1x
• J – 0.2x, 0.4x, 0.7x
• 10 – 0.1x, 0.3x, 0.5x

The gap between the themed symbols and the royals is steep. Five Red Pouches at 22.2x is more than three times what any royal manages, and the drop-off starts immediately below the top of the table. Even the Gold Coin and Red Lantern keep clear distance from the card symbols, so the themed half of the paytable is doing nearly all of the paying that matters.

At the bottom end, three tens returns a tenth of the stake. Royals this cheap exist mostly to keep the line count busy between the symbols that actually move the needle, which on a 40-line grid means most spins will clear their line bet on royalty alone or not at all.

The wild is a gold lion-face icon with its own row in the paytable, where it ties the Red Pouch as the joint-richest symbol in the game, so a full line of lions is the top prize on the board. It’s also the only symbol in that top tier that can appear in every one of the worlds, which makes it the one to watch whenever the reels start behaving unusually.

The Four Worlds

The heart of Lions Dance is its collection of worlds, each a modifier that changes how the reels behave. Five are named, and three of them come with a clear explanation of what they do.

Mystery Tiles World

Here the Mystery Coin spins to reveal a single random paying symbol beneath it. Every coin on the grid resolves to the same symbol, which means a screen full of them can turn into a full grid of whatever the coin settles on.

The reveal is the whole point of this world. A coin landing on a royal is a quiet spin; a coin landing on the Red Pouch converts every coin position at once into the game’s joint-top payer, which is the cleanest route to the biggest line hits the game offers. Nothing about the coin’s position matters until the reveal, so each spin carries a small wait-and-see quality that the plain base game doesn’t have.

Mega Tiles World

In this world the top-paying symbols and the wild can appear as Mega Tiles, oversized blocks that occupy more of the grid than a single standard symbol would. Because a Mega Tile counts across every position it covers, one landing favourably can complete several of the 40 lines in a single spin.

Only the premium end of the paytable gets this treatment, so the world’s value is concentrated. A Mega Pouch or Mega wild is the equivalent of several stacked premium symbols arriving at once, which is why this modifier sits closest to the game’s ceiling.

Deep Stacks World

Random reels spin containing a single type of top-paying symbol or wilds, stacked from top to bottom. On a four-row grid that means a whole reel of identical premiums, and any reel stacked with wilds stands in for every payline that crosses it.

Two such reels adjacent to each other is close to a best-case board: every line running through the pair starts with premium symbols or wilds from the left, which is exactly where paylines are won. The modifier doesn’t guarantee a win, but it concentrates the odds on the lines that pay best.

Connected Tiles and Mystery Symbols

Two further worlds, Connected Tiles and Mystery Symbols, are named alongside the others but their mechanics aren’t spelled out the way the first three are, so what they change on the reels is something you’ll only settle by playing. Given the naming, both look to be variations on the same idea of symbols grouping or resolving together: Connected Tiles suggests symbols treated as linked blocks, and Mystery Symbols points at hidden-symbol reveals of the kind the Mystery Coin already performs.

Free Spins

The bonus round awards up to 18 free spins, and the twist is what happens when it ends: you return to the same world you were playing to keep going. Rather than dumping you back into the base game, the round loops you back into whichever modifier you triggered it from.

Inside the round, a random feature fires on every spin, with the four worlds occurring at random throughout. So a free-spins session isn’t one modifier held for its duration; it’s a different one arriving on each spin.

That’s a notably different shape from the standard free-spins template of one enhanced rule held for the round. Mystery Coins resolving into premium symbols one spin and full reels of stacked wilds the next means each spin carries its own small reveal, and 18 of them is a lot of variety for a single bonus. The return-to-your-world rule on top of that keeps a good run going rather than resetting the momentum at the round’s end.

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 7.2/10

Playing Lions Dance means waiting in a fairly plain 40-line corridor for the next door to open, and that door opening is the whole reason to be here. When a world takes over, the reels genuinely become a different game, and the festival scene framing it all is handsome rather than perfunctory.

The best thing here is the free-spins round: a different random feature on every one of up to 18 spins, and a return to your world at the end rather than a reset. The worst is that two of the five worlds never explain themselves, so a real slice of the game’s character is left for you to decode mid-session.

It’s a good fit for players who like a slot that keeps changing its mind and don’t need a printed ceiling to aim at. Anyone chasing one big number with a clear ladder under it will find the party thin. Everyone else can enjoy the drums.

Lions Dance FAQs

• What is the RTP of Lions Dance?

  Lions Dance runs at a total RTP of 96.18%.
• How many paylines does Lions Dance have?

  There are 40 paylines, and only the highest combination on each line counts towards a win.
• What is the grid size of Lions Dance?

  Lions Dance plays on a 5×4 grid, five reels across and four rows high.
• What does the Mystery Coin do in Lions Dance?

  In the Mystery Tiles World, the Mystery Coin spins to reveal a single random paying symbol beneath it, so every coin on the grid resolves to the same symbol.
• What are Mega Tiles in Lions Dance?

  In the Mega Tiles World, the top-paying symbols and the wild can appear as oversized Mega Tiles on any spin, covering more of the grid than a standard symbol.
• How many free spins can you win in Lions Dance?

  You can win up to 18 free spins, and when the round ends you return to the same world you were playing to keep going. A random feature fires on every spin during the round.
• When is Lions Dance released?

  Lions Dance’s release date is 1 April 2019.
• Who makes Lions Dance?

  Lions Dance is made by Eurasian Gaming.