Blackbeard: The Golden Age Introduction
Avast and shiver me timbers! Gaming1 has come up with a cracker of a pirate-themed pokie in Blackbeard: the Golden Age. A relatively new company on the gaming scene, they’ve certainly put together all the elements you’d want to see in an epic seafaring adventure in one pokie.
This is a relatively well-worn genre, but Gaming1 has brought everything together in this great pirating pokie. If you like your free online pokies with plenty of swashbuckling and a healthy bucket of free spins, this is the one to play.
Theme
We’re back in the days of piracy, when Blackbeard and his crew wrought havoc on the seven seas. Rendering of the symbols is particularly sharp, with ships and pirates and pieces of eight - in fact, there’s all the pirate paraphernalia you’d expect to see in a game with this theme.
One nice touch is the slick way the symbols float over the reels at speed before coming to a stop. The soundtrack has a pumping rhythm backed by the sounds of the sea that perfectly reflects the rhythm of the reels. This becomes quite hypnotic after a while!
Format
Five reels and 10 paylines are on offer here, and as the game pays out in multipliers, the bigger your stake, the bigger the potential reward. It’s easy to adjust your bets using the intuitive task bar, so you can tweak your staking options as you go. In our test spins, we were landing winning combinations almost from the first spin, so this is one game that favours a swashbuckling approach to your line bets.
Fortune favours the brave
The pay table symbols in Blackbeard: the Golden Age are grouped into lower-paying symbols that turn up quite commonly in winning combinations and the harder-to-land symbols that reward the higher multipliers. The Jack, Queen, King and Ace pay up to 5x multipliers for five in a line.
The coin, cannon, treasure map and treasure chest are rarer and carry higher rewards, with Bluebeard himself paying the biggest prize with a 40x multiplier. A nice feature is that this symbol also pays both ways.
The Jolly Roger
It’s always good to see a Jolly Roger in a pirate-themed pokie. After all, it is an icon of the genre. Here it’s the wild symbol, animating and emitting a deathly cackle when it lands on your reels and produces winning combinations.
Sail the seven seas
The sailing ship is the scatter symbol that triggers a free spins bonanza. No matter where they sail on the reels, three of these stately galleons take you to the free spins bonus. Like a ship’s wheel in a storm, it just keeps spinning. The reels fill with stacked wilds, and more galleons can trigger up to an incredible 100 free spins. Hit this bonus and you’ll rack up more wins than Captain Jack Sparrow has tattoos.
A pirate’s life for me
Simple yet compelling gameplay plus a perfectly integrated theme equals buccaneering bounty when you hit the free spins bonus.
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