Wild Toro 2 base game: five rows that become eight

Symbols pay when they touch. Three or more of a kind in positions adjacent to one another award a win, and adjacency includes the diagonal, so a cluster that no payline would ever have drawn still counts. This is why reviews and the studio alike talk about connecting ways rather than paylines: the figure is the number of distinct touching paths the current grid allows, and the current grid is not a constant.

The paying set has eight members. Four card royals, jack through ace, dressed up with ribbons, sit at the bottom. Above them come silver coins, gold coins, a knifed orange and a flower, in that order, with a five of a kind on the best of them paying five times the stake and the weakest of the four around a fifth of that. By the standards of modern slots those are small line pays, and they are supposed to be: the game is built so that the base combinations tick over while the respins do the real work.

The studio states the rule in one sentence: each Matador in view adds an additional row of symbols, up to a maximum of eight rows. Because ways are counted from the shape of the grid, the number climbs with each added row rather than in one jump at the end. A British review prints the whole ladder, and the two end points on it are stated everywhere: five rows is 259 ways and eight rows is 502.

The ladder is worth reading once and then forgetting the middle of, because the useful part is the ratio. Going from the opening grid to the full one almost doubles the number of ways a touching cluster can be made, and it does that while walking Wilds are moving across the reels. That combination is the whole design: more room arrives at exactly the moment there are more Wilds to put in it.

A Matador landing does three things at once: it adds its row, it starts the respin sequence, and it becomes something that moves. On every respin each Matador shifts one reel to the left, and the sequence continues for as long as any of them is still on the grid. When the last one walks off the left edge the feature is over and the grid returns to five rows.

Two details decide how long that lasts. New Matadors can land during the respins, and when they do they add their own row and their own walk, extending the sequence from the right while the older ones are leaving from the left. And the bull can arrive in the middle of it, which switches the feature into its named form. A single Matador is all the game asks for to begin, against three in the original, and that lower bar is the change players notice first.

The silver Matador is the plain version: a walking Wild that stands in for any paying symbol as it crosses the reels, awarding a respin per step. The gold Matador does the same and carries a multiplier, which increases by one for every step it takes, so a gold symbol that lands on the right-hand reel and survives the walk is worth considerably more than one that lands on the left. Nothing about that multiplier is random after it appears; it is a counter attached to a distance.

The black Matador is the one that catches people out. It triggers the row expansion and the respins exactly like the other two, and it walks like them, but it is a blocker rather than a Wild: it cannot complete a combination on its own. In practice that makes it a mixed arrival, good for the shape of the grid and useless for the win it is sitting in the middle of. Together with the bull these three symbols are the entire feature set of the game, because there is no separate round to be won.

Wild Toro 2 has no free spins round, and that is a design choice rather than an omission. The features trigger from paying-grid symbols landing in view, not from collecting scatters, which means there is no state to build up towards and no moment where the game stops and hands control to a bonus. Several reviews point this out approvingly and at least one points it out as a drawback, which is a fair argument in both directions.

The practical effect is that sessions do not have the two-speed rhythm most slots have. There is no dry stretch that is being spent earning a feature, so a run of plain spins is simply a run of plain spins. Whether that reads as honest or as flat is a matter of taste, and it is one of the few things about this game that a free round answers better than any description. The figures page covers the hit rate a catalogue publishes for it, which is the nearest thing to a number on the question.

The 2016 game ran on five reels and four rows with 178 connecting ways, and its respin feature waited for three matadors to be in view. Three of anything is a rare event, which is why the original is remembered as a slot with a good feature rather than as a slot that shows you its feature. The sequel starts the whole sequence on one, and because each matador also adds a row, the thing that triggers the feature is the same thing that makes the feature bigger.

That is a different design philosophy rather than a tuning change. In the first game the reel set was a stage the characters performed on; here the characters build the stage as they go. It also explains why the paytable looks thin: with the sequence arriving regularly, the base combinations do not have to carry the game between visits, so they are allowed to be small. A five of a kind on the best symbol is worth five times the stake, which on its own would be a disappointing slot and in this structure is a deliberate floor.