Paylines
243-7,776 ways to win
Sails of Fortune is Relax Gaming's 2022 pirate slot, and it's one of those releases that looks like a standard 5×3 grid until you actually trigger the bonus. Then the whole thing rearranges itself. The base game runs 243 ways across a carved wooden frame mounted on a sailing ship deck, with a Caribbean sunset bleeding orange and pink behind the reels. There's a pirate captain, a parrot, a swashbuckling crew, and the obligatory ship cresting turquoise waves as your top symbols. Card royals come painted onto wooden barrels. It's a familiar theme, but the art holds up better than most pirate slots I've seen.
The base hit rate sits around 25%, so roughly one in four spins lands something. That keeps the session bearable without ever feeling generous. The real engine here is the Mystery Map Respin. When a treasure map symbol lands, it locks and triggers a respin. The map then roams across the reels as respins continue, and every new map landing extends the sequence. When the respins finally stop, every mystery flips to the same paying symbol. Sometimes that's a barrel ten. Sometimes it's the captain. The variance inside a single feature can be brutal.
Free Spins are where the math gets interesting. Land 3+ treasure chests and you trigger Treasure Hunt Free Spins, starting at 5×3 with 243 ways. Collect more chests during the bonus and the grid physically expands, first to 5×4 (1,024 ways), then to a maxed 5×5 with 7,776 ways. Mystery symbols can also expand to cover multiple positions during the bonus, which is where the 25,000x max win actually becomes reachable.
The Buy Bonus costs 70x bet and gives you the trigger at 96.56% RTP, slightly higher than the 96.17% base. Here's the catch worth flagging: the buy doesn't pre-collect any chests. You're starting at 5×3 just like a natural trigger, and you still need to earn the grid expansion the hard way. A lot of buy-bonus players assume they're paying for the maxed grid. They're not.
Volatility is a true 5/5, and you'll feel it. Dead spells happen. But a 25,000x cap on a medium-grid slot is generous, and the expanding-grid mechanic gives the bonus genuine identity. Bet range runs 0.10 to 100. Worth a few sessions if you've got the patience for the variance.