Wanted Dead or a Wild Slot: Three Bonus Rounds, Three Buy Prices and a 2x to 100x VS Reel at the Centre

In 2021, Hacksaw Gaming released a Western slot that did something unusual with its bonus round: it built three of them, gave each its own scatter symbol, and in markets where feature purchase is allowed, put a different price on each. Wanted Dead or a Wild is a 5x5 grid with 15 fixed paylines, a published RTP of 96.38% and a 12,500x ceiling. Its real design idea sits in the gap between those three bonus rounds, and in what the price list says about them.

One Symbol Doing Two Jobs

Most of the game's character comes from a single symbol. The VS symbol carries a multiplier between 2x and 100x, and when it forms part of a winning line it expands to cover its whole reel as a Wild. The published rules add one extreme case: if VS reels cover the entire 5x5 grid, the whole grid is treated as Wild.

That makes the VS symbol the game's volatility dial. A reel that turns Wild at 2x is a modest event. A reel that turns Wild at 100x on a grid where other reels have done the same is the route to the cap. Everything the three bonus rounds do is, in one way or another, a decision about how often that dial gets turned, and how long its effects are allowed to stay on the screen.

The ordinary Wild, the tin star, is deliberately limited by comparison. It substitutes for paying symbols but not for bonus or VS symbols, so it cannot help trigger any of the three features. It fills lines; it does not open doors.

Three Rounds, Three Shapes

The Great Train Robbery is the gentlest of the three. It awards 10 free spins, and every Wild that lands stays sticky for the rest of the round. Published listings describe its volatility as medium. Sticky Wilds accumulate, so the round tends to improve as it goes, but it builds from ordinary Wilds rather than from the multiplier carrying VS symbol.

Duel at Dawn, triggered by three or more Duel symbols, also awards 10 free spins, but loads the reels with more VS symbols. Listings rate it very high volatility, and it is one of the two rounds that published listings say can reach the 12,500x maximum. Here the dial is turned often, and each turn is independent: a 100x reel on spin three is no more likely because spin two was quiet.

Dead Man's Hand, triggered by three or more Dead symbols, is the odd one out, and the most interesting piece of design in the game. It is not a free spins round at all. It runs in two phases. In the first, respins collect Wilds and multipliers, and each new collection resets the counter to three. Only after three respins in a row add nothing does the round move on. In the second phase, the collected Wilds return to the grid for a three spin showdown, with the gathered multipliers applied.

The structure borrows the counter reset from hold and respin games, then grafts it onto a payline game. What it changes is timing. In Duel at Dawn, value arrives spin by spin. In Dead Man's Hand, almost nothing pays until the end, and the whole round is decided by how much was gathered before the counter ran out. Listings rate it high volatility, and it is the second round listed as able to reach the maximum win.

What the Price List Reveals

Where feature purchase is permitted, Hacksaw prices the three rounds at 80x, 200x and 400x the stake for the Great Train Robbery, Duel at Dawn and Dead Man's Hand respectively. These options are not offered to players in Great Britain.

A buy price is a design document hiding in plain sight. A studio prices a feature close to its average return, because pricing it far below would give money away and pricing it far above would make the option pointless. On that reading, the price list ranks the three rounds by average size: Dead Man's Hand returns on average roughly five times what the Great Train Robbery does, and Duel at Dawn sits between them at two and a half times. The volatility labels then say how unevenly each average is delivered.

Seen this way, Wanted Dead or a Wild is less one slot than a small menu of variance profiles sharing a theme. The base game decides, at random, which profile a session meets. That is a different philosophy from games with a single bonus scaled up or down by a buy multiplier, and it explains why discussion of this title tends to be about which round landed rather than whether the bonus was good.

Where the Numbers Stop

The 96.38% figure is the default configuration. Listings report alternative versions at 94.55% and 92.33%, so the figure in front of any given player depends on the operator, and the paytable or help screen is where it is stated. The buy prices above do not reveal the exact return of each purchased round, which is not published, and no hit frequency for the base game is given. The ranking by price is an inference from how buy features are normally priced, not a published figure.

FieldValue
ProviderHacksaw Gaming
Release2021
Grid5x5, 15 fixed paylines
RTP96.38% default; 94.55% and 92.33% versions reported
Max win12,500x
VS multipliers2x to 100x

Responsible Gambling

A game built around rare, large outcomes will spend most sessions far from them, and the three bonus rounds share that shape. In Great Britain, gambling is for adults aged 18 and over and is regulated by the UK Gambling Commission. GAMSTOP offers free self exclusion from UKGC licensed online sites, BeGambleAware provides advice, and the National Gambling Helpline, run by GamCare, is on 0808 8020 133.

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