Koban Strike by Tinex Games follows a ninja thief collecting gold at a lantern-lit shrine. The ordinary five-by-four reels offer 1,024 ways to win. Three or more Gongs then replace those reels with an empty Loot Run board, changing the task from connecting symbols to building a locked collection of prizes.
Quick take: New loot resets the respin counter, while special symbols can increase, copy or collect values already on the bonus board.
Theme and Gameplay
On an ordinary spin, follow matching symbols from the first reel across consecutive reels. Three reels begin a winning run, and a gap stops it. More than one matching symbol on a reel can create several ways through that run. Wilds can help connect it, but Gongs have a separate job: opening Loot Run.
The ninja and gold-koban setting fits the change of pace. Once the feature starts, stop tracing ways across the reels and look at the separate five-by-five board. Its twenty-five cells begin empty, leaving room for the collection to develop.
Slot Features
Loot Run starts with three respins. Anything that lands locks into an empty cell and stays there; one or more new symbols reset the counter to three. A miss uses a respin. The feature ends after three misses in a row, or immediately when the board is full, and the cell values are added together.
SURGE increases loot values already on the board once when it lands. It does not keep boosting later arrivals. DUPLICATOR copies an existing loot value into its own cell. PROWL stores a collected total in its cell while leaving the other prizes on the board. Those different effects make the timing of a special symbol matter as well as its position.
Three Gongs open the standard run, four the Charged version and five the Prime version, with the higher tiers offering richer loot and specials. The feature menu also offers direct entry into those tiers.
Feature focus: A new landing both fills a cell and restores three respins. During a dry spell, watch the counter; when a special lands, check what it changes in the values already collected.
RTP and Win Potential
The RTP is 95%, with a 10,000x maximum win. Filling all twenty-five cells adds a 2,000x award on top of the board values, within the overall win limit. That full-board award is a separate target from the maximum; neither should be treated as the expected outcome of a Loot Run.
My Thoughts On This Slot
An empty bonus board gives Koban Strike a satisfying starting point: every locked cell is visible progress. The three-respin reset also makes the next landing easy to understand, even when the board becomes busier. SURGE, DUPLICATOR and PROWL then create three distinct reasons to pay attention to the prizes already in place.
The feature asks for a different kind of viewing than the ordinary ways game, which is both its attraction and its trade-off. If you enjoy a collection developing one cell at a time, the shift makes sense. If you prefer to stay with one reel format throughout, the separate grid and special-symbol effects add more to follow.
Final Take: A ninja-themed ways slot whose Loot Run turns an empty grid into a growing collection of locked prizes.