Mermaids Millions Slot
Not to be confused with Merlin's Millions, Mermaids Millions is an altogether different kettle of fish from Microgaming. This was one of the first successful online slots put out by Microgaming, and has five reels and a maximum of 15 pay lines. The theme – as you might have guessed – concerns those nice nautical nymphets, mermaids. Half fish, half lady (usually lady from the waist up is the preferred choice as opposed to the other way around), famous sea-fairing souls such as Columbus and Blackbeard reported seeing mermaids, although it's thought what they actually encountered were sea-cows. Months (or years) away at sea does funny things to a chap's mind … so said Columbus at his subsequent trial for bestiality.
The symbols used in this game are all nautically-inclined, including playing card values ten to ace, plus clams, seahorses and treasure chests. There are fifteen possible pay lines and all are selectable. You can choose your coin size from 0.01 to 1.00, plus the number of coins you wish to wager from one to five. Your final bet-per-spin is these three amounts multiplied. When you're satisfied with your wager, hit the spin button.
Payout & bonus rounds
Payouts are achieved by landing identical symbols in sequence from the left-hand reel on one of your active pay lines. The lowest payout is 'double your stake' available for three tens or jacks. The top prize is for five symbols of whom we think is Neptune (not the planet), at 7,500x your bet-per-line.
Neptune (still not the planet) doubles as the wild symbol in this game, and substitutes for all other symbols aside from the treasure bonus and scatter symbols.
A lovely mermaid (we assume – you can only see her face) acts as the scatter symbol. Land two mermaid symbols anywhere to bag a win, or three or more to win ten free spins. During free spins all wins are tripled.
There's also the 'Treasure Bonus' symbol. Land three or more treasure chest symbols on an active pay line and you'll find yourself choosing three treasure chests out of the one dozen available. Each chest contains a prize, and you could win up to 2,500 coins!
This game is one of Microgaming's most successful online and mobile slots ever, but over a decade's worth of salty water has allowed the rust to accumulate, and there are much better slots around these days. There's nothing wrong in respecting a classic though, and Mermaids Millions is definitely that.