Wild Toro features: the 5x4 grid, its 178 connecting ways and twelve stake levels

How the 178 ways are counted, and why they are not paylines

A win here needs three or more matching symbols on neighbouring reels, counted from the leftmost reel inwards, and the row each symbol sits in does not matter. That is what connecting ways means, and it is why the figure is 178 rather than a round number: it is the count of distinct adjacency patterns the grid allows, not a set of lines drawn across the screen. Several reviews call them paylines out of habit. On a four-row ways grid there are no lines to trace, and nothing is lost by ignoring the word.

The practical difference shows up when a wild moves. On a fixed-line game a wild helps only the lines that happen to pass through its square, so moving it one reel sideways either helps or does nothing. On a ways grid, every position a wild occupies contributes to every combination that can reach it, so a wild that walks across five reels is five separate chances rather than one chance repeated. That is the whole reason this particular mechanic was put on this particular format.

It is worth knowing where 178 sits in the catalogue, because the number sounds smaller than it is. A traditional five-reel game offers twenty or twenty-five lines; the later generation of ways games offers 243, 1,024 or millions. At 178 the screen is still legible — you can see which symbols made a win without replaying the spin — while a moving wild still has somewhere to be useful. Games that went to five figures of ways gave that legibility up in exchange.

Grid

5 reels by 4 rowsstudio

Win evaluation

178 connecting waysstudio

Direction

left to right, beginning on reel onereview

Minimum combination

three matching symbols on adjacent reelsreview

Studio

ELK Studiosstudio

The symbol ladder, from a bronze coin to the red rose

Six paying symbols, and they are all props from the square rather than card ranks: bronze, silver and gold coins at the bottom of the ladder, then a folding fan, then a Seville orange with a dagger driven through it, and a red rose at the top. Above those sit three symbols that do not pay in the ordinary way at all — the game's own logo as the wild, the bull, and Diaz the matador.

A British review that published the paytable gives the rose at two, five and ten times the total stake for three, four and five of them. That single figure tells you more about how the game is balanced than any amount of description: a top symbol worth ten spins means the base game is not where anything happens. Everything interesting is in the respins, and the paytable is built to make sure of it.

The same review notes that the wild substitutes for every symbol except the bull and the matador. That exception is not housekeeping — it is what keeps the two characters functional. If a wild could stand in for a matador, the respin trigger would fire on wild trails, and if it could stand in for the bull the walking mechanic would start itself. Excluding both is what makes each of them mean one thing.

The paytable values below were recorded from inside the game by a British review. The studio publishes no paytable for this title.

Top paying symbol

the red rose: 2x, 5x or 10x the total stake for 3, 4 or 5review

Mid symbols

a folding fan, and an orange with a dagger through itreview

Low symbols

bronze, silver and gold coinsreview

Wild

the game logo; substitutes for everything except the bull and the matadorreview

Non-paying characters

Toro the bull and Diaz the matador, each with its own jobstudio

Stake levels: twenty pence to a hundred pounds, in twelve steps

Reviews that have set the bet put the range at 20p to £100 a spin, chosen from 12 fixed steps rather than typed in freely. The low end covers all 178 ways, which is the number that matters: there is no cheaper partial bet here, so the smallest stake is a complete spin and not a reduced one. The game's own internal notation is in coins, which is where the quoted maximum of 225,000 coins comes from, and how it maps onto a cash figure depends on which step you are on.

Twelve steps rather than a slider is a design decision with consequences for the bet tools described below, because those tools move you up and down the ladder automatically. A step is a defined distance; a slider would not be. If you intend to use any of the automatic bet behaviour, it is worth knowing which step you started from, because the tools are described in steps and not in pounds.

It is also worth knowing what the stake does not change, because the question comes up constantly about games of this vintage. Moving up the ladder multiplies every outcome and nothing else: it does not make features arrive more often, does not improve the quoted return and does not unlock anything. A game that behaved otherwise would have to publish two different return figures, and this one ships in a single version according to the catalogues that record such things. The ladder is a volume control, not a difficulty setting.

An operator can change the currency and the local minimum, and a few have historically shipped different step tables, so the range above is the one most commonly published rather than a guarantee for your account. The bet panel inside the game is the only place it is certainly true, and this applies to every number on this site that came from a catalogue rather than from the studio.

Betting Strategies: the four bet-level tools named in the game data

ELK Studios lists Betting Strategies in this game's published data alongside the mechanical features, and the phrase is easy to misread. It does not mean advice, a guide or an article about bankroll management. In this studio's vocabulary it means built-in tooling that changes your stake level for you according to a rule you pick before you start.

A review library that documented them describes four, each named for a colour. One adapts the stake to a chosen percentage of the balance. One moves you up two steps after five losing spins in a row. One raises the stake by a step after each loss, up to four steps above where you began. The last does the opposite and climbs a step after each win, also capped four steps up. Those four descriptions come from one source rather than from the studio, so they are offered here as that review's account of the tools and not as a rulebook.

What none of them does is change a probability, and that is the sentence worth keeping. A tool that stakes more after losses is a tool that loses more per hour when the run continues; a tool that stakes more after wins gives back more of the win when the run ends. They change the shape of a session, not its expectation, and the house share is applied to whatever the stake happens to be at the time.

Hit frequency, and what a quarter of spins actually means

One British review gives a hit frequency of 24.9% — roughly a quarter of spins returning something. That is a single-source figure and it is printed here as one, but it is worth having because it answers a question the return percentage does not. A return figure tells you about a very long run; a hit rate tells you what the next twenty minutes will feel like.

A quarter is middling for a ways game of this size, and it fits the rest of the design. Three quarters of spins returning nothing on a grid whose top symbol pays ten times the stake means the arithmetic of the game lives in the respin features, which is exactly where the studio put all four of its named mechanics. It also explains why the various volatility ratings for this game disagree so widely: a frequent-but-small base game with a feature-heavy top end can honestly be described as medium or as high, depending on which half you weigh.

Treat all three of these numbers — return, hit rate and volatility — as a description of a long average rather than a forecast. None of them is a property of your session, and no sequence of recent spins makes any of them more or less true of the next one.

What the fourth row is for, once a wild starts moving

A four-row grid is unusual enough to be a decision rather than a default, and on this game the fourth row earns itself three times over. It gives the matadors somewhere to stand on the three middle reels without pushing the paying symbols off the screen. It gives a wild trail the vertical space to look like a trail. And it gives the artwork room to animate behind the reels, which on a game this character-led is not decoration but part of how a feature announces itself.

It also sets the ceiling on how complicated this game ever gets, which is a point in its favour. The grid never grows, never collapses and never changes shape mid-spin. Compared with what the studio did later — a grid that stretches to eight rows in the second game, and a grid with modes in the third — the original is a fixed board with one thing moving across it, and that is the whole reason it is still readable at a glance nine years on.