Wild Zombies Wild symbols and the Brain Jar values

Zombie Stacked Wilds

A stacked Wild is a Wild that arrives several cells tall. On a board four rows deep that means one symbol can take an entire column, and a column covered by a Wild enters every line that passes through it. With 16 lines on the board, a single full stack on a middle reel is doing a great deal of work at once — which is exactly why a game with a line count this low can still reach a ceiling this high.

The characters are the ones that stack. On one recorded screen three adjacent columns are filled by the lumberjack, the cheerleader and the doctor, each column carrying a value in large type at its foot: 5x, 2x and 200x. That is the clearest single image of how this game pays, because it shows that the stacks are not interchangeable: three of them landed together and carried three different values.

The opening screen puts a number on the top of that range in its own words — STACKED WILDS UP TO 200X. 200x is therefore the highest stack value the game advertises about itself, and it is a value on a symbol rather than a promise about a session.

Brain Jar Wilds

The jars are the second kind of Wild and the most recognisable thing on the board: three glass jars with a brain floating in each, lit purple, green and amber, with a multiplier printed across the front in the game's own lettering. The values are 2x, 20x and 200x, and they appear both on the board during play and on the panel the game shows before the session starts, which is unusually generous — most slots make a reader find the paytable.

The jars are tied to the respin round by that same panel: STICKY WILDS TRIGGER BRAIN LAB RESPINS. A sticky Wild holds its position while the rest of the board turns again, and the jars are what a held position tends to be carrying. The arrangement is easy to picture — the board keeps what it has and tries again for more — and it is the reason a round of this kind is where the three-figure multipliers show up.

What is not published is how the three values are distributed: nobody states how often a 200x jar lands rather than a 2x one, and nothing here estimates it. The jump from 2x to 20x to 200x is a tenfold step each time, which tells a reader something about the shape of the game without telling them anything about its frequency.

Expanded Wilds that roam

The third behaviour is the one the published list calls Walking Wilds and the opening screen calls an expanded Wild that roams: EXPANDED WILDS ROAM THE REELS. The two names describe the same thing from two angles. Expanded is about shape — the Wild grows to fill its column. Walking is about time — it is still there on the next spin, one reel further along.

A walking Wild is a different proposition from a stacked one even though both end up covering a column. A stack is a single event: it lands, it pays or it does not, and the board moves on. A walker is a sequence: it covers a column, the reels turn, it covers the next column, and anything that lands around it in the meantime is being read against a board that is already part Wild. On a sixteen-line board that compounding is what the studio's high volatility word is describing.

The panel showing this behaviour is the third of the three the game displays, and it shows two character Wilds standing in adjacent columns with the rest of the board blurred — the visual shorthand for movement. It is the only one of the three panels that implies a sequence rather than a single screen.

Scatter and the regular symbols

The Scatter is a green hand under the word SCATTER. It is the only symbol on the board whose position does not matter: the regular symbols pay on the 16 lines, left to right from the leftmost reel, and the Scatter is counted wherever it falls. That is why it is drawn so differently from everything else — a green plate against a board of coloured character frames and wooden planks.

The regular cast is a bearded lumberjack with an axe, a cheerleader with a bow, a chef in a red frame, a glowing teddy bear, a fuel can, a chainsaw, a medical case and four wooden letters. The four letter symbols sit at the bottom of the table, the objects in the middle, and the characters in their coloured frames at the top; a reader can rank them by eye before seeing a single payout figure, which is a sign of a well-drawn paytable rather than a fact about the maths.