Golden Grimoire (NetEnt): Introduction

If you have a taste for the mystical, you might already know what a “Grimoire” is. If you’re more like us—whose knowledge of all things witchy goes little further than a couple of episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch—you’d probably need to look it up.

A quick search shows that the word Grimoire is thought to come from Old French, while the book itself is believed to trace back to the ancient Middle East. In practice, a “Grimoire” is essentially a more elegant term for a witch’s diary: a magic book containing instructions for creating enchanted items, particularly amulets and talismans.

In online gambling terms, Golden Grimoire is a 5-reel, 4-row slot with 40 fixed paylines of low to medium volatility. With wagers ranging from 0.20 up to 400 EUR per spin, it comes with an RTP setting of 96.44%. At first glance, Golden Grimoire can feel a little puzzling, but it’s actually quite straightforward, built largely around symbol transformation that works in both the base game and the bonus.

As you’d expect from NetEnt, the presentation has been given serious attention, and the end result looks as impressive as ever. Set within a sorcerer’s chamber, it’s packed with small details and animations to keep your mind engaged—hidden scripts and occult markings appearing as the reels spin, a star-filled sky revealing the Earth’s orbit, and scatter teases that make objects eerily float. It’s a clear showcase of the remarkable talent at Netent. If only the math side were allowed the same creative liberty.

Golden Grimoire (NetEnt): Symbols, Paytable & Features

There are 8 regular symbols in total, and they appear fully stacked on the reels in both the base game and the bonus. On the reels you’ll find hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds, along with beetles, snakes, cephalopod molluscs, and spiders clutching gemstones. The spider is the highest-paying symbol, awarding 1 time your stake for 5 across a full payline.

At the heart of the gameplay is the Mystery symbol, shown as a spellbook with a question mark. Like the other symbols, it lands fully stacked, but in the base game it can only appear on reels 3, 4 and 5. When it hits, a random symbol is chosen and all Mystery symbols transform into that symbol. If the Mystery symbol matches the leftmost symbol on the same row, then every symbol in that row changes into the same symbol. If the Mystery symbol becomes a wild, the same process applies, except now the entire row turns into wild symbols regardless of what’s on the first reel.

The wild is displayed as a golden skull and can only show up through symbol transformation.

Golden Grimoire (NetEnt): Free Spins

You’ll receive 8 free spins by landing 3 scatter symbols on reels 1, 3 and 5 respectively. The focus remains on the Mystery symbol, and while it works much the same way, the bonus adds a couple of extra advantages. The stacked Mystery books are now also able to appear on reel 2. Most importantly, any Mystery symbol that lands during the feature becomes sticky and remains in position for the entire bonus round.

Since the bonus cannot be re-triggered, it’s absolutely crucial to hit as many sticky books as you can early on if you want to get much value from it. Even in the best-case scenario of landing a full-screen top-paying symbol, the payout is capped at 200 times your stake. Unless our math is wildly wrong, you shouldn’t expect more than 1000x from this feature, and even that outcome would be extremely rare.

Golden Grimoire (NetEnt): Conclusion

It’s honestly surprising to see NetEnt continue with this kind of low-potential approach, especially given the wave of criticism the company has faced lately for exactly that. With the NetEnt CEO herself openly addressing the issue—showing awareness and offering a fairly sober assessment—we genuinely expected a reset with the start of a new year.

Unless you’re specifically drawn to medium variance slots with minimal upside and don’t mind spending your time going nowhere, we can’t offer any solid gambling-related reason to play this from a practical standpoint. If your only goal is to pass the time and stay mildly entertained, you’d be better off pairing your socks. NetEnt, please pay your design team more and look after them—they may be the main reason you still have any chance at all.