How to play
Ice Palace runs on five reels of three rows with 20 paylines. The base game is quiet on purpose; the reason to play is the free spins round, where wilds freeze onto the grid and stay.
Set your coin with the buttons under the reels (1, 2, 5, 10 or 20). Your stake per spin is that coin multiplied by the 20 lines, and the pay amounts in the Pay table panel are shown for the coin you picked. Press Spin. Lines are read from the left reel, and each line pays only its best match.
Three or more Free spins crystals anywhere on the screen, on different reels, pay a scatter prize and start the bonus. The big button then reads Free spin and counts down the remaining spins. Your coin is locked until the last one is played. You start the session with 1,000 credits.
How the frozen wilds work
During free spins, every Ice wild that appears is frozen to its cell. On each later free spin the reels turn as usual, but the frozen cells keep showing the wild, so the grid collects more and more of them as the round goes on. All of them melt when the free spins end.
Two details matter:
- Wilds that land on the spin that triggers the bonus don’t freeze. Only wilds landing during the free spins themselves count.
- Three more crystals during the bonus add spins (8, 12 or 15 again), and the frozen wilds stay for those extra spins too.
| Crystals | Scatter prize | Free spins |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2× total bet | 8 |
| 4 | 10× total bet | 12 |
| 5 | 50× total bet | 15 |
Pay table
Coins per line:
| Symbol | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ice wild | 14 | 71 | 285 |
| Snowflake | 8 | 34 | 143 |
| Ice crystal | 8 | 28 | 86 |
| Silver crown | 6 | 22 | 57 |
| Frozen heart | 4 | 14 | 43 |
| A | 3 | 8 | 28 |
| K | 2 | 8 | 23 |
| Q | 2 | 6 | 17 |
| J | 1 | 4 | 14 |
| 10 | 1 | 4 | 11 |
The Ice wild substitutes for every picture and royal but never for the crystal.
The odds
Each reel has 35 stops with just one wild and two crystals. That single wild is why the base game feels thin: wilds are scarcer here than on most of the five-reel machines, and the line pays are modest. Three or more crystals land about once every 26 spins.
Over 2,000,000 rounds at the smallest coin the game returned about 95.7% of stakes, with 28.9% of rounds paying something. That’s a simulated figure and the true value may differ by a few tenths of a percent. A large share of the return comes from a handful of long bonus rounds where the wilds pile up, so this is a high-swing machine.
Strategy
Nothing you do changes where a wild lands; the reels are random each spin and the frozen positions are simply whatever came up. So the useful thinking is about budget.
- Plan for gaps. With a feature once per 26 spins on average and many dead base spins, pick a coin that gives you at least 50 or so spins from your balance. At coin 1 a spin costs 20 credits; at coin 5 it’s 100.
- Early wilds are the valuable ones. A wild frozen on the first free spin helps all the remaining spins; one that lands on the last spin helps once. That’s luck, not skill, but it explains why two bonuses of the same length can pay very differently.
- The 15-spin version is rare. Five crystals need every reel to cooperate, so most bonuses are 8 spins.
If you’d rather have wilds that move than wilds that stay, try Walking Wilds. For a free spins round with an expanding symbol instead of sticky wilds, Temple Tome is the other one to look at.
If you enjoy Ice Palace, try Irish Poker or Jackpot Roulette next.
