Slot hustlers love this game, and it’s not hard to see why. You’ll occasionally find some juiced-up boards that can pay you 40x your bet or more on just a few spins. You’ll see some “camping” on the Zodiacs, where knowledgeable folks will wait behind a set of these machines and hope someone leaves a nice board behind.

But what does a minimum play look like? Below is the worst type of screen I’d consider playing, which happens to be on the Dragon version:

Those gold frames lock from spin to spin. In some ways it’s like Wild Pirates, where setting off one frame triggers all the adjacent ones, making them wild. As you spin, a dragon head/lion head symbol adds frames to the board, depending on which version of the game you’re playing. Ideally, you have them all touching, so that when one is set off, they’re all set off.

In the example above, the four frames on the bottom are touching and the one at the top of reel two isn’t. As stated above, this is getting into borderline territory, but that horizontal build of four is just good enough to play. Any less, and I wouldn’t consider it.

How about something like this?

That may look like five frames touching between reels two and three, with an additional two in reel five, but it’s not. That mini cluster was triggered the previous spin, so all that’s in play are the two frames in reel five. Now, even if everything were active in this example, it would be quite fringe because we don’t have much of a horizontal build.

As mentioned up top in the minimum play section, I’d play with eight or more frames if they were touching, regardless of location. I know some folks wouldn’t play that if it were a vertical grouping in reels four and five primarily, but there’s enough potential with this kind of build, even if you’ll take some lumps along the way.

In fact, if there were 10 locked frames anywhere on the screen, I’d be a player. Yes, while it’s not ideal for them to be scattered across the board and on an island of sorts, having that many is a green flag for the “Lion Spin Bonus” possibility alone.

I don’t have my own footage of that, but I added a video from Casino Kelly at the end of this write-up. If you skip ahead to 1:53 in that video, you’ll see she was able to trigger this feature, which comes randomly. Fortunately for her, she had a number of locked frames on the screen and was able to “catch” three or more symbols to trigger the bonus. So for that bonus possibility alone, regardless of possible line hits in the base game, I’d be a player with 10 or more. Of course, the more locked frames you have, the better your chances of catching three or more symbols.

But if you don’t have that many frames, ideally you find four or more frames building horizontally like in the first example above, and you want at least part of it in the first three reels.

How about something like this?

There, you have four total circles, with two connected in the first two reels and one in column five. This would be a clear “no.” If you added at least two more connecting frames to that initial duo going horizontally, you could make a stronger case for playing.

One other thing to be aware of: The bets on the top row don’t have what’s called the Zodiac Wheel. Think of it like Ocean Magic or Ocean Magic Grand with the Bubble Boost on the bottom row of bets. Pays are better on the top row since you have less of a chance of randomly adding a bunch of frames, but it all evens out in a sense, so I wouldn’t worry about it when evaluating possible plays.

Regardless of where you’re betting, every now and then, you’ll really smash one:

If you’d like to see this game in action, here are my videos below. I also added the aforementioned footage to demonstrate how the bonus feature works.

Videos: