Wild Toro bonus games: Toro Goes Wild, the Matador Respin Challenge and the free-spins question

Toro Goes Wild: the named bonus game, and what sets it off

This is the one the studio calls a bonus game, and it begins without ceremony. The bull is already walking across the grid as a wild; if a matador is in view while he does, he charges it. Operators running the title describe the bull marching at the matador and turning what it crosses wild, then returning to its ordinary leftward walk once the matador has been dealt with. One bull can see off several matadors in the same sequence.

The name is doing more work than it appears to, and it is worth a sentence. A bonus called Toro Goes Wild puts the character and the mechanic in the same three words, so a player who has seen the feature once has also learned what the phrase refers to. That is why it survived into the sequels in altered form while the rest of the game's vocabulary did not: the second title renamed it with a different verb and the third built a whole bonus around a different object entirely, but all three kept the pattern of naming the feature after what the bull does.

There is no stake to pay, no screen to choose from and no meter to fill. That is worth spelling out because the words bonus game now usually promise one of those three, and here they promise none of them. What they describe is a state the base game can enter on its own, which also means there is no way to buy into it — a point of difference from the second game in the series, where paid entries exist by design.

The one thing the public description does not give is how the charge resolves arithmetically: how many squares turn wild on which paths, and in what order the evaluation happens. The studio does not publish it and no review claims to have reverse-engineered it, so this page does not either. What is published, repeatedly and consistently, is the trigger and the visible effect, and that is what is written above.

Studio's own name for it

Toro Goes Wild, listed as the bonus gamestudio

Trigger

a walking bull and a matador on the board at the same timeoperators

Effect

the bull charges; the squares it crosses turn wildoperators

After the charge

the bull resumes walking one reel left per respinoperators

Cost to enter

none — there is no purchased entry in this gamethis site

Three matadors on the middle reels, three respins, and one more for each

The second named feature has the cleaner trigger of the two, and an unusual number of independent descriptions agree on it almost word for word. Three matador symbols landing on reels two, three and four in the same spin start the Matador Respin Challenge. The matadors then become sticky — they hold their positions — and three respins are awarded. Every further matador that lands during the feature adds one more respin, and the feature runs until the respins are exhausted or the bull has dealt with every matador on the board.

The studio's own phrasing for what the feature gives you is the right one to keep in mind: additional chances to meet the sought-after Toro. That is an honest description of the mechanic rather than marketing, because the respins themselves are not where the value is. They are a way of buying more opportunities for a specific symbol to land on a specific reel.

Six operators licensed in Britain describe this trigger on their own game pages in almost identical terms, which is about as close to a published rule as a slot feature gets outside a rulebook. That matters for a page like this one: it is the difference between a mechanic this site can state and a mechanic this site has to attribute, and the respin challenge is firmly in the first category.

Trigger

three matador symbols on reels two, three and four in one spinoperators

Immediate award

three respinsoperators

Matador behaviour

sticky — each holds its position for the featureoperators

Extra matadors

one additional respin eachoperators

Feature ends

when the respins run out, or when no matadors remainoperators

Why the respin challenge is really an engine for walking wilds

Read the two features separately and the respin challenge looks like the smaller of them: a handful of free respins on a grid whose top symbol pays ten times the stake. Read them together and it is the more important one. A British review states that the bull turns up on reel five considerably more often during the challenge than in the base game, which means the feature is not primarily giving you respins. It is giving you walking wilds, and giving them to you at a moment when there are already matadors stuck on the middle reels for the bull to charge.

That is the actual loop of this game, and it is worth having in one sentence: matadors stick, the bull is likelier to arrive, the bull charges each matador in turn, and every matador it reaches widens the trail of wilds across a grid that pays by adjacency. Nothing about that requires a separate bonus screen, a multiplier or a purchase, which is why a 2016 game still reads as coherent next to what came after it.

It also explains the quoted ceiling. The maximum win that catalogues give for this game is 2,250 times the stake — modest by current standards — and it is reachable in exactly one way: a long challenge, several matadors, and one or two bulls crossing a board that is mostly wild by the end. Anyone who understands that sequence understands why the ceiling is where it is, which is more useful than the number on its own.

One corollary is worth stating because it cuts against how these features are usually advertised. Nothing in either feature accumulates between them. A long challenge does not leave a meter part-filled for the next one, a charge does not bank anything, and a trail of wilds does not carry into the next paid spin. Each sequence resolves completely and the board returns to its ordinary state. That is why no amount of watching this game tells you anything about the next spin, and why the arithmetic of one good challenge is the whole of what a good session is made of, repeated.

Free spins: the studio lists them, and one review says they are not there

The published feature list for this title from ELK Studios reads wilds, walking wilds, respins and free spins, and that list is the source our own earlier description of this game was built on. Meanwhile a review library that has documented the game from the inside lists among its drawbacks that there is no traditional free-spins bonus and no scatter symbol, and says in its own question section that respins do that job instead. Those two statements are flatly opposed on the face of it.

The reconciliation is probably about vocabulary rather than about the game. A respin that costs nothing is a free spin in the plain meaning of the words, and a studio writing a feature list for a catalogue has every reason to use the term players scan for. A reviewer, on the other hand, means something specific by free spins: a counted round triggered by scatters, usually with its own rules, which this game does not have. On that reading both are describing the same thing and only one of them is being strict.

There is a second reason the question gets asked so often, and it has nothing to do with either source. Free spins are the feature players check for first, because on most games they are where the money is, so a feature list that mentions them sets an expectation before a word of description is read. On this game that expectation is pointed at the wrong place: the money is in a long respin sequence with several matadors and a bull crossing a board that is mostly wild by the end. A player waiting for a counted bonus round to begin is waiting for something that is not coming, while the thing they were hoping for has already happened twice.

What this site does not do is pick a side and present it as settled. If you are expecting a scatter-triggered round with a spin counter and its own feature rules, you will not find one here, and you should go in knowing it. If you are expecting spins you do not pay for, the respin features supply them in quantity. The honest answer to the question is both halves of that paragraph, and anyone who gives you one half without the other has simplified the game rather than explained it.

What sticky means when the game has no scatter symbol

Sticky and scatter are usually a pair: scatters land anywhere and count, and sticky symbols hold their place during the round the scatters started. Here the matadors do the first job and the second job both, and they do the first one only in a very restricted way — not anywhere on the grid, but on the three middle reels, three at a time. The game therefore behaves as though it has scatters without having any symbol that pays scattered, which is exactly the sort of detail that makes two reviewers describe the same game differently.

The practical consequence is a short list. You cannot be paid for matadors appearing in scattered positions. You cannot trigger anything from reels one or five with them. And the wild cannot stand in for them, which is what stops the respin challenge from firing off a wild trail. Every one of those restrictions exists to keep the matador meaning one thing, and it is the same reasoning that excludes the bull from wild substitution.

It also shapes what the game asks of a new player, and the answer is pleasantly little. There is no scatter count to learn, no meter to interpret, no feature menu and no second screen with its own rules. Two characters do two jobs: one of them moves and turns things wild, the other stands still and buys respins while it waits to be charged. Somebody who has never opened the paytable can watch a single long sequence and understand the entire game, which is rarer than it should be and is the reason a title from 2016 is still worth describing carefully rather than filing as old.