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When Mancala Gaming announced a sequel to Buffalo Goes Wild, I was eager to head back to the North American plains to see what had changed. The developers have kept the familiar 5×3 grid (20 paylines here) and the gorgeous wildlife artwork, but they’ve rebuilt the bonus from the ground up.
The most noticeable change? The max win has been chopped down to 3,000x your stake, and the bonus mechanics now revolve around three collection pots. I gave this one a short session to see whether this stampede is worth your bankroll.
The Base Game: A Volatile Prairie Grind
The base game in Buffalo Goes Wild II can be a brutal stretch of prairie. This is a highly volatile slot, and it shows. During my session, I hit a patch of 20+ dead spins where nothing happened.
When you do hit, you’ll notice the paytable is incredibly top-heavy. Landing a five-of-a-kind line of premium Bears or Buffalo Wilds pays a very sweet 50x your stake. However, drop below the top two symbols, and the values fall off a cliff. A full line of mid-tier Lynxes or Raccoons barely pays more than a three-of-a-kind, and the royal symbols are just there to mock you. Three “J” symbols will only return half your bet, meaning a “win” is actually a loss. You aren’t playing this game for base game line hits.
The Pot Mechanic: Teasing the Trigger
What keeps you awake during the base game grind are the buffalo-coin Special symbols. These land with cash values ranging from 0.25x to 50x your stake and fly up to feed three persistent pots sitting above the reels: Multiplier, Coin Booster, and Jackpot.
Here is my slight gripe with this mechanic: the game doesn’t actually tell you what raising a pot level does, or what the threshold is for a trigger. The pots just get visually fatter. Any random Special coin can trigger the Respins Bonus Game, and whichever specific coin triggers it will dictate which of the three modifiers you get. It’s a fun visual, but since the rules never say what a fuller pot does, I wouldn’t read a full pot as a bonus on its way.
The Respins Bonus Game: Where the Real Money Lives
When the bonus finally drops, you get a classic hold-and-win round with 3 respins that reset. The standard cash coins stick to the grid, but the modifier you triggered with makes all the difference:
- Multiplier: Drops a symbol that reveals a random multiplier (up to 10x) and applies it to a coin on the board.
- Coin Booster: Adds a flat value to every single coin present.
This feature is also where that 3,000x max win lives, and the straightest road to it is the Jackpot symbols, since the top jackpot alone reaches the cap. It’s a collection game: two Jackpot symbols pay 100x, three pay 250x, four pay 1,500x, and you need all five to hit the top prize. Fair warning, though: a single Jackpot symbol on its own pays nothing. It just sits there as a dead space until a second one lands, which can be agonizing when you are down to your last respin.
Free Spins: The Hidden Gem
While the Respins are the main event, don’t sleep on the Free Spins feature. Triggered by landing three scatters on the odd reels, you get 10 spins on the standard board.
The twist here is fantastic: the regular Buffalo Wild is replaced by a 2x Doubling Wild. If you get two of these on the same payline, the line is doubled twice over. You can’t retrigger the free spins naturally since scatters are removed, but Special coins can still land. This means you can trigger the Respins Bonus Game from inside the Free Spins round, which is always a plus in my book.
If you have the patience for a grindy base game and love the thrill of chasing collection pots, it’s definitely worth a few spins. Just make sure you manage your bankroll for those dry spells.
