Fortune of Giza: Slot Overview

So, players, have you ever felt like certain studios are running low on fresh concepts and start recycling existing formulas just to keep releases coming? If that idea makes you wince, Pragmatic Play has one that may do exactly that. It’s called Fortune of Giza, an Egyptian themed slot where sticky wild multipliers in free spins are the main source of excitement. Despite the sun, sand, and towering stone monuments, it’s hard to miss that Fortune of Giza is essentially a straightforward reskin of the Pragmatic Play 2019 hit, The Dog House.

That pretty much covers the visual identity of Fortune of Giza. The same “not exactly new” vibe extends to the presentation, which showcases familiar tourist scenery around the Giza pyramids. If we’re digging for something noteworthy, it’s the fast-moving clouds along the horizon—does it signal a gloomy day, or is bad weather on the way?

We may never get an answer, but one thing is certain: the highly volatile math model can swing just as dramatically. The core figures are unchanged from the earlier game, with RTP available in at least two known versions—96.51% or 95.51%—and the same 6750x max potential returning as well. You can set your stake anywhere from 20 p/c to $/€100, and The Dog House round 2-style chaos is playable across devices.

Looking closer at how it works, Fortune of Giza runs on a 5×3, 20 payline layout, paying for 3 to 5 matching symbols. To count, winning combos must land on adjacent reels and begin from the leftmost reel. There are ten standard symbols: five 10-A card ranks paying 1.25-2.5x the bet for five of a kind, plus five traditional Ancient Egypt premium icons that award 5 to 37.5x the bet for five of a kind on a payline. Yes—exactly as before.

Fortune of Giza: Slot Features

Moving on to the features, wilds play a key role in the base game and get an added kick during free spins. Wilds can land on reels 2, 3, or 4 and substitute for all symbols except the scatter. On top of that, wilds arrive with a multiplier of x2 or x3, boosting any winning line they help complete. When multiple wilds contribute to the same win, their multiplier values are added to each other.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols show up on reels 1, 3, or 5, and landing all 3 at once awards 5x the bet and access to the free spins feature. Next, a 3×3 grid appears to calculate how many free spins you’ll receive. The values in each square are added together, producing a total of 9 to 27 free spins. The real energy in this round comes from wild symbols becoming sticky—when they land, they remain in their position for the rest of the bonus. As in the base game, wilds land on the middle three reels and carry x2 or x3 multipliers.

Fortune of Giza: Slot Verdict

When this review was written, Pragmatic Play was releasing slots at a relentless rate, flooding the market with new titles one after another. Keeping that tempo without leaning on a few recycled concepts would be difficult for any developer. Even so, while it’s easy to see why Pragmatic Play chose to replicate The Dog House, the final product could have felt stronger with a more distinctive theme layered on top. The situation looks even more questionable considering Pragmatic Play launched Cleocatra not long before—another Egyptian themed slot built around sticky multiplier wilds. To be fair, Cleocatra wasn’t the outright copy Fortune of Giza is, and it also had adorable cats.

Still, even though Fortune of Giza brings nothing fresh mechanically, the sticky wild multipliers can be just as entertaining as they were in The Dog House. Then again, perhaps not quite as impactful, since several years have passed since The Dog House first arrived. In the meantime, plenty of excellent sticky wild multiplier slots have appeared, with NetEnt’s Dead or Alive 2 and Relax Gaming’s hip hop pup game Top Dawg$ standing out as two strong examples. As a result, Fortune of Giza doesn’t hit as hard as the original, even though it retains the same max win of 6,750x the bet. It also suffers from feeling like a rerun, and its bland take on a well-worn theme gives it less personality than the lively dogs that made the original so memorable.

After spending time with Fortune of Giza, it became clear that much of The Dog House’s appeal came from its cheerful pups and upbeat tone. By comparison, Fortune of Giza looks far more generic. It plays fine and the cloning process has been executed cleanly, but it’s so aggressively unoriginal that it ends up feeling more like filler for the catalogue than a must-play release.