What Is the Legacy of Dead Expanding Symbol?

Picked at Random from 9 Symbols

The pick is pure chance: as free spins begin, the game draws the expander from nine regular symbols, never the tomb. Play'n GO's rules need one line for it. "1 regular symbol (except Scatter) is chosen at random to become a special Expanding Symbol in Free Spins." Nobody chooses it, you included. The client shows the pick on a scroll before the first spin, next to the spin count.

There are nine candidates. Four are picture symbols: the crowned figure with a crook, Anubis, the golden mask and the winged scarab. Five are card ranks, A, K, Q, J and 10. Which one comes up matters a lot, because the paytable spreads them wide. An expanded crowned figure is worth 5,000 coins per coin for five on a line, while an expanded 10 tops out at 80. The best outcome of one feature can be more than sixty times the best of another.

The rules don't say whether every symbol has the same chance of being drawn, and we found no weighting in anything the studio publishes. Two draws are all we have.

When an Expanding Symbol Opens Up

An expanding symbol opens up once enough copies land to pay, and for Anubis the game server showed that two copies were enough. For the other symbols the count is our inference from the paytable, not a published rule. The rules leave the word "enough" undefined. Picture symbols pay for two of a kind and card ranks need three, so we assume expansion follows the smallest paying count.

Read on 2 Nov 2026; a source can change after that date without notice.

For Anubis the game server confirms it: its log of our free spin 4 of 8 records the symbol expanding over two reels and paying. The letters and the 10 never expanded in our two rounds, so their three-copy threshold stays an inference. Play'n GO could confirm or kill it in a sentence it hasn't written.

Paying with Gaps Between Reels

Expanded copies pay along active lines even when an ordinary reel sits between them, and that is the whole trick. The rules put it plainly: "Special expanding symbols will pay for any winning combination with gaps allowed". They add that these wins run left to right "beginning on any reels where a winning combination is possible". In the base game a line win has to start on the leftmost reel and run unbroken.

Here is what that looked like in our first round. On free spin 4 of 8, Anubis filled reels one and three while reel two showed K, 10 and J. The spin paid 250 coins across the gap, 25 on each of the ten lines, by the game server's log. Our frame reads 245 because the round's win counter was still counting up from 225. In the base game, that layout pays nothing for Anubis.

The same rule gives one route to the ceiling, by our arithmetic. A crowned figure expanded on all five reels runs through all ten lines. Then 5,000 coins per coin × 5 coins × 10 lines gives 250,000 coins, exactly the "WIN UP TO 250000 COINS!" printed on the paytable. That sum is ours; the studio prints the result and not the working.

Why the Count Stops at Nine

The likeliest reason the count stops at nine is that the game has exactly nine regular symbols, and every retrigger draws one more. Three or more tombs during the feature bring "An additional 8 free spins" and "An additional special Expanding Symbol". The start screen promises "up to 9 special EXPANDING SYMBOLS", and the studio's game page calls the potential for free spins unlimited.

Those rows are our arithmetic from the rules. They assume the draws never repeat a symbol, which the cap of nine suggests and the rules never state. Once eight retriggers have landed, every regular symbol on the reels is an expanding one. What a ninth retrigger does beyond its eight spins isn't written anywhere we read.

A long shot, to put it mildly.

Our Two Rounds, Both on Anubis

Both features we played in Play'n GO's demo on 2 November 2026 drew Anubis, and that is a coincidence of two cases rather than a pattern. Over 205 paid spins at 1.00 across five launches, tombs arrived twice; each time the client awarded eight spins, and neither round retriggered. The client's total for the first read 2,650 coins, or 53.00, and for the second 1,025 coins, or 20.50. Both totals include the spin that triggered the round, worth 225 and 150 coins.

Anubis sits mid-table, paying 1,600 for a five-of-a-kind line, below the crowned figure's 5,000 and above the mask's 600. Fully expanded on all five reels and ten lines at our bet, 0.02 a coin and five coins, it would pay 80,000 coins. That's 1,600.00. Our best was 53.00, and across the whole session 205.00 went in while 153.00 came back, 74.6% of the stake. A run this short says nothing about the long-run return.

We do not recommend treating the expanding symbol as something to wait for or chase. The draw is random and the demo is play money. Learn the draw there first, where an Anubis round costs nothing and a dud round costs nothing either.

Where Book of Dead Does It Differently

Book of Dead, the studio's 2016 slot, keeps one expanding symbol for the entire round and never adds a second. Its feature opens with ten free spins rather than eight, and a retrigger there brings another ten spins on the same symbol. The studio's text for that game words the trigger more tightly. There the symbol "will expand only when additional prizes can be awarded along active paylines", where Legacy of Dead's rules say only "when enough of the respective symbol lands".

Both games' demo paytables print the same 250,000-coin ceiling. So the newer slot gives up two opening spins for the chance to stack symbols. We'd call that the more interesting feature of the two, though two rounds can't tell you which one pays better over time.