Trigger three Scatters and the reels pause for a choice. Buffalo Horde or Prairie Multipliers. Both modes hand you 8 spins, both run the same collect mechanic where 5 energies pulled from Buffalo symbols hand back a reward plus +2 spins. What shifts is the reward itself. Horde converts one animal symbol on the reels into a stacked Buffalo, compounding the density of the top-paying icon. Multipliers instead pins +1x onto a chosen animal, capped at x5 per symbol. The in-game help spells out which is statistically stronger: Buffalo Horde is the RTP-optimal pick. Prairie Multipliers chases the ceiling.
That escalation on the Multipliers side carries one rule worth flagging because nothing else in Nolimit's catalogue runs it quite this way. Every new animal you upgrade also drags every previously-upgraded animal up by the same step. Pronghorn sits at x2, you collect another 5 energies and Coyote lands at x3, and Pronghorn jumps to x3 too. The Buffalo's own multiplier climbs +1x for every animal upgraded. So the back half of a Multipliers round, especially with all those +2 retriggers, ends in a state where six symbol types are sitting at x5 and the Mighty Buffalo carries a stacked bonus on top of that.
Five Scatters skip the choice and trigger the Stampede Super Bonus. That's 12 spins running both modes at once: each 5-energy collect awards a multiplier upgrade and an animal-to-Buffalo conversion and +2 spins. At 20 collected energies the round flips into an endgame where every reel position is a Buffalo and the multiplier locks at x5. Predictable peak variance, by design.
The base game runs on Mystery Symbols, which land stacked and crack open to reveal a single paying symbol. That's the only amplifier outside the bonus, and yeah, the base game does feel a bit thin when the Mystery doesn't show up. Buffalo Hunter predates Nolimit's xMechanic suite (engine 0.53.1, no xWays, xBomb or xSplit), so it's a cleaner, almost old-school NLC build. The art sits in a tribal-carved weathered-wood reel frame with brass-tack inlay, against a sunset prairie of golden grass and storm clouds over distant mountains. A 2-tier feature buy sells direct entry into the 3-Scatter Free Spins at -2% RTP or the premium 5-Scatter Stampede at -3%. Same tiered-buy structure Nolimit has carried into every frontier title since.