Book of Xerxes Diamond Treasures

The Book of Xerxes performs the traditional dual role of Wild and Scatter. As a Wild, it can substitute for regular symbols to help form winning combinations. Land three or more Books and you trigger 10 Free Games.

It's probably one of the most recognisable mechanics in online slots and Apparat makes no attempt to reinvent it.

That works in terms of accessibility. You see the Book, you know what you're waiting for and three of them open the bonus.

Original? Absolutely not.

Effective? There's a reason developers are still making Book slots decades later.

Landing three or more Book symbols triggers 10 Free Games.

Unlike feature heavy modern slots where entering Free Spins suddenly introduces several new meters and modifiers, the structure here remains extremely focused. The excitement comes almost entirely from the special Bonus Symbol selected at the beginning of the feature.

This simplicity will either be one of the game's strengths or its biggest weakness depending on what you're looking for.

One independent reviewer who played the game praised its presentation but found the base game relatively uneventful and reported that neither the Diamond Treasures mechanic nor Free Spins delivered particularly well during that specific test session. That's only one play experience, rather than evidence of expected performance, but it reinforces how dependent the game is on its headline features actually coming to life.

At the beginning of Free Games, one regular paying symbol is randomly selected to become the Golden Bonus Symbol, Apparat's version of the classic Expanding Symbol mechanic.

When enough of the selected symbols appear, they expand to cover their entire respective reels before receiving a special win evaluation.

This remains the best part of the core Book gameplay.

There's immediate anticipation when the selected symbol is revealed because its value matters. Then every appearance of that symbol during the remaining spins becomes considerably more interesting than it would have been during normal play.

It's an old trick, but watching three or four reels suddenly fill with the same premium symbol hasn't stopped being satisfying simply because we've seen it before.

Activate the optional Diamond Treasures Side Bet and qualifying Diamonds are collected into a treasure chest during play. Continue collecting them and eventually the chest opens to activate the Diamond Treasures multiplier game.

This is the main difference between this edition and the original Book of Xerxes.

It gives the base game another visible objective. Instead of your entire attention being focused on finding three Books, Diamond collection creates a second route towards something interesting.

That's useful because conventional Book base games can be pretty sparse.

The limitation is that Diamond Treasures largely operates alongside the Book mechanics rather than transforming them. It's an additional attraction rather than a reinvention of the original game.

Complete the Diamond collection and you're taken to a separate 4x1 Multiplier Slot capable of producing a random multiplier reaching 9,999x.

It's a simple payoff to the collection mechanic. There aren't multiple stages or complicated decisions once you've opened the chest. You reach the multiplier game and discover what reward you've uncovered.

The potential 9,999x obviously provides a substantial headline number, while the game's overall maximum exposure is officially capped at 25,000x.

I wouldn't overrate the feature simply because of that enormous maximum multiplier, though. Our scoring is based on what the mechanic actually adds to the game, not how many nines Apparat can fit onto the screen.

The Diamond Treasures Side Bet increases participation in the collection feature, with Apparat confirming that higher Side Bet settings improve the chance of uncovering the chest's larger rewards.

We'll continue using the industry term Feature Bet for this type of mechanic.

It's particularly important to mention here because Diamond Treasures isn't simply an unconditional extra feature operating identically at every stake setting. Player participation affects how the side game behaves.

Where permitted, Buy Feature allows direct entry to Free Games for 90x the stake. Apparat officially lists the 90x price, and several independent databases confirm the same figure.

As with all our reviews, this doesn't receive additional rating points. Paying 90x to reach the feature faster doesn't make the feature itself any better.