Powered by SlotsReach.com
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: if you open Wondertrain and look at the paytable, you might want to close the game. A five-of-a-kind line of top-tier Gold Bars pays a measly 2.5x your bet, and the lower-paying cargo and royals pay absolute pennies.
But before you jump ship, you need to understand how ELK Studios has designed this game. You aren’t chasing raw symbol values here; you are chasing the heavy machinery sitting right above the reels. Wondertrain is a game of chain reactions, and when it fires on all cylinders, that weak paytable suddenly makes a lot of sense.
The Base Game: Sticky Respins and The Bell
Every time you hit a winning line or a coin combo, Wondertrain triggers a sticky respin. The winning symbols lock into place, and the rest of the board spins again. This keeps going as long as you keep adding to the win.
Above the grid is a Multiplier Track carrying train cars with random values, all feeding into a Global Multiplier Bell. With every successful respin, the track moves left, dropping the leading car’s multiplier into the Bell. When your respins finally stall out, that Bell multiplies your total line wins.
During my session, it became incredibly obvious how reliant the base game is on this Bell. In one round, a line of four suitcases worth 0.3x climbed to a respectable 3.9x payout simply because a couple of respins fed the Bell up to 13x.
The problem? When the respins don’t chain, the board is dead quiet. Because of the low symbol values, short wins feel like losses. At one point, I hit a cold streak of about eight dead spins where nothing locked in. The volatility is only medium, but you still have to be prepared for the grind.
Coins and Wilbur’s Coin Fever
ELK loves a dual-economy game, and Wondertrain runs a second one right alongside the standard paylines. Bronze, Silver, and Gold coins land on the grid, and hitting three in view pays their combined value. Note: These are paid out before the Bell is applied, so your global multiplier will never boost a coin win.
Every coin that lands flies into a Coin Collect meter. According to the rules, this meter can trigger the “Wilbur’s Coin Fever” bonus. However, the exact trigger threshold is a mystery. I watched my meter suck up seven coins over my base spins without triggering the feature, which can be a bit frustrating if you like transparent mechanics.
When Wilbur’s Coin Fever does trigger, it’s fantastic. It transports you to a separate 5×5 Hold & Win grid with the bottom three rows fenced off. You need “Pressure” symbols to unlock those rows. It comes with ELK’s usual cast of modifiers, a Collector that sweeps up all values, and a Dealer that boosts everything on the board. The best part? Any coins that make it to the bottom row double in value every time a new symbol lands there.
The Bonus Spins: Chasing the +25 Meter
Triggering the main bonus spins requires 3, 4, or 5 Bonus scatters (awarding 10 spins, 15 spins, or a 15-spin Super Bonus, respectively). I’ll be honest: the closest I got in my session was two scatters teasing me, so this bonus is definitely a tough one to land organically.
Once inside, the grid remains the same, but a Multiplier Wild Meter appears. This is where the game gets its teeth. The meter climbs one level per spin, starting at +2 in the regular Bonus (the Super Bonus opens further up, at level 5) and eventually capping at a massive +25. When a Multiplier Wild lands on a winning line, it injects the meter’s current value directly into the Bell, while subsequent wilds add their values to the cars on the track.
Because the Coin Collect meter stays active during free spins, you can actually trigger Wilbur’s Coin Fever in the middle of your bonus round.
That separation is the defining feature of the game. To hit a massive payout, you need one of two things to happen: a deep run in the Coin Fever side-game with the fences down and a Collector doing heavy lifting, or a late-stage bonus spin where the meter hits +25 and turns a board of cheap symbols into an absolute monster.
