Golden Buffalo Slot Review: stalk big $$$ wins over the plains

Get ready to roam the vast plains and rugged plateaus among stampeding herds on the proprietary Golden Buffalo slot from Bovada Gaming. Golden Buffalo takes you on a highly volatile ride across six reels with 4,096 ways to win. Stacked symbols and wilds will keep you in suspense in the base game while wild win multipliers can reach a lofty x3,125 in the free spins that could see you return with staggering wins of up to $500,000.

Overview and Design

The Wild West theme is one of the most used in video slots and at least on par with other popular topics such as Norse mythology, ancient Egypt, and the Aztec civilization. One item that stands out in the Wild West designs is the regular use of rugged plateaus and views of endless plains as background. Bovada Gaming obliged and pegged their reel set on top of a ridge overlooking a deep canyon on a sunny day.

Golden Buffalo Uses a Somewhat Unusual 6x4 Reel Arrangement

A tent flanked by a camp fire and cargo packages serves as canvas for the main game area. Naturally, some of the wild animals and the mighty bison dominate on the reels to an intense soundtrack complete with their cries and howls. In the Free Spins, the scenery is changed to a dusk setting with a torch being lit while the sun sets gloriously in the distance.

Golden Buffalo has the hallmark format that made this slot type so popular. Six reels and four rows in combination with a ways-mechanic result in 4,096 ways to win on every spin. Pays are awarded for landing matching symbols anywhere on adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost. You will need a minimum of three low-value symbols or two premiums to score a win. Payouts for a single six of a kind range from 1.25x to 10x your stake.

Match Any Position on Reels Left to Right to Score a Win

Betting starts at just $0.40 and peaks a highroller-friendly $200 per spin. Theoretically, wins of 40,960x stake are possible in the base game for a full screen of buffalo symbols or in combination with stacked wilds. In the free spins, hitting a full stack of buffalos on reel one and x5 wild multipliers on the other five reels would yield an incredible 125,000x bet. However, the maximum payout for a single game round or bonus feature has been capped by the developer at $500,000 irrespective of the bet size.

Unsurprisingly, Golden Buffalo comes with very high volatility that can lead to significant swings in both directions. The Return-To-Player percentage (RTP) has been noted with a respectable 96.00%, which is well within the industry average.

Paytable to Golden Buffalo

The pay symbols are beautifully crafted, starting at the low end with card royals from 9 through to A, each decorated with tribal markings and awarding 1.25 to 2.5x your bet for a single six of a kind. They are followed by four animal symbols – badger, wolf, eagle and buffalo. Hit six across the reels to win 5x to 10x your stake. An icon with a view of a rugged rock formation is the wild, appearing on reels two to six and substituting for all regular symbols. Lastly, a Bonus symbol acts as the scatter.

Golden Buffalo Slot Features

Anyone who has visited a land-based casino will have probably come across Raging Rhino from Scientific Games subsidiary Williams Interactive (WMS). The immense popularity made it the perfect candidate not only for a transition to online casinos in HTML5 format but also a constant target for other developers to create their own versions. Bovada Gaming joins, with Golden Buffalo, the dozens of game studios clamoring for a piece of this pie although there is a small difference that might be sufficient to separate it slightly from the masses.

The mentioned twist are stacked wilds in the base game. They can land on reels two to six with a full screen providing the potential for an all-ways pay should you hit at the same time four symbols and no scatters on the first reel. The wild stacks are a rare occurrence; however, all regular pay symbols can appear in stacks too on any reel, providing ample potential to score mega wins in the base game.

Golden Buffalo Free Spins Feature

The main attraction on Golden Buffalo is the highly volatile Free Spins feature as you are about to find out. Hitting three, four, five or six scatters anywhere on the reels will trigger 8, 15, 25 and 100 Free Spins respectively. Unlimited retriggers are available with two to six scatters adding 5 to 100 spins during the feature.

The stacked wilds from the base game are replaced with single multiplier wilds for the duration of the bonus round. Any wild landing in a winning combination on reel two to six will reveal a random multiplier of x2, x3 or x5. More than one in a combo will be multiplied by each other. Hit them on all five reels to score win multipliers between x32 and x3,125. The feature ends when you run out of spins or reach the win limit of $500,000.

Golden Buffalo Mobile Play

Bovada Gaming has been one of the frontrunners for mobile gaming ever since the era of smartphones began more than a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, all their slots and games are developed to be compatible with virtually any desktop or mobile devices running on Android, Windows or iOS, including iPhones and iPads.

Golden Buffalo on a Mobile Device

Using the same landscape user interface for desktop and mobile makes it easy to transition between devices without having to memorize different menus and controls. The portrait mode on smartphones and tablets will see the main controls move to the bottom of the screen while the remainder stays unchanged.

Big Wins on Golden Buffalo

People often ask if this slot actually pays out. The answer to this lies in checking the internet to find examples of real players posting wins. Here are some examples of huge wins from players playing the Golden Buffalo Slot:

In this reddit post, user CryptographerFun836 posts a five-figure win on the Golden Buffalo slot. This win is 670 times his bet!

In this thread, where a player shares his win of $195 on a 40 cent spin, another player, dmoney175, mentions how he has won $1,000 over seven times, and $3,000 three times!

There are many many other examples of big wins on Golden Buffalo and here are links to more forum threads where real players post their experiences and wins:

1. Golden Buffalo Just Changed My Life
2. Buffalos Blessed Me Last Week
3. Big Win On Golden Buffalo
4. Golden Buffalo Turning $900 Into $10,000

Conclusion

It is nothing short of amazing to see some slot formats gaining such a popularity that virtually every major developer is trying to release their own version. The 6x4 game engine with 4,096 ways was built around 2010 as an improvement to the 5x3 engine and 243 ways that emerged from Microgaming studios a few years earlier.

While the new format was well-received from the start, it was WMS who enshrined it into the annals of video slots with their Raging Rhino creation. Today, there are dozens if not hundreds of similar games that can be found in off and online casinos.

Golden Buffalo from Bovada Gaming is a worthy addition to the iconic format with suspenseful gameplay, crisp graphics, impressive animations, an intense soundtrack and a staggering win potential. Beware though, the high volatility might see you return at times empty-handed from your journey to the Wild West.

Where to Play

With a slot like Golden Buffalo that has a high volatility, you might wish to play with practice chips first before committing your own funds. Therefore, we have embedded below a play chip version that you can try out.

When you're prepared to play Golden Buffalo for real money, there are only a few sites that have this slot. Fortunately, we have reviewed six of them, and you can learn more about the one that best matches your geographical and gameplay requirements by clicking on it below:

• Ignition Casino (Casino | USA + Australia)
• Bovada (Casino + Poker + Sports | USA)
• Bodog (Casino + Poker + Sports | Canada + LATAM)
• Joe Fortune (Casino | Australia)
• Slots.lv (Casino | USA + Canada)
• Cafe Casino (Casino | USA)