Ask the Slot Expert: This slot is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

I found a new Egyptian-themed slot to play, King Khufu. You know how much I like Egyptian-themed slots, so I had to give this one a try.

Like many slot games today, Khufu has three BS meters (piles of coins, in this case) not showing you how close you are to triggering a bonus event. In this case, the piles are for the three flavors of the Lock & Respin bonus: Grow, Boost, and Roll.

I don't make big bets on a machine until I know how it works, so I chose the penny denomination and the minimum bet, which is $1 per spin.

One of the symbols on the reels is a gold coin with a credit amount superimposed over a triangle. Wait! That's not a triangle. Well, it is a triangle, but it's also a pyramid. And Khufu built the Great Pyramid. I get it now.

When a coin appears on the screen, a flipping coin flies up from it to one of the three piles above the reels. Coins on the left side of the screen go to either the left (Grow) or middle (Boost) pile. Coins on the right feed either the middle or right (Roll) pile.

On many other machines I've played, landing circles with amounts trigger their Lock & Respin bonuses, so I figured landing a number of coins on the screen would trigger the bonus. I've needed six symbols to trigger this type of bonus on other machines, so I figured I would need six on this machine too.

The most coins I landed on a spin was four, so landing six symbols can't be how to trigger this bonus. The bonus wasn't triggered with four coins, so landing coins doesn't seem to be the trigger.

Paying a little closer attention to the screen, I saw a rotating display beneath the BS piles and above the reels. The display showed how to trigger the various bonus features in the game. Three wheel symbols trigger the Wheel Bonus (Duh!). Three Khufu symbols, really Tut's funerary mask, trigger the Free Games bonus. The display says that the Lock & Respin bonus is triggered by having both a coin and a symbol that looks like Hathor's headdress (a sun disk surrounded by a cobra) land on the screen. Isis is sometimes pictured with a similar headdress.

I had seen this symbol land on the screen before. It only appears on the center reels (3 and 4, this is a 6-reel game). When it appears, the game chooses one of the symbols that landed on the reels, displays it in the disk in the symbol, and then turns those symbols into wild symbols wherever they appear on the reels.

Sometimes the game would also turn adjacent positions wild. It seemed to happen at random and for no reason. Maybe I'll figure this out if I keep playing.

There's one more part of the game display that must have something to do with something. There's a path of rectangles and trapezoids like you'd see on a board game on the sides and top of the reel display. Four of the rectangles are gold. Four different tokens travel around this path, occasionally moving to new positions during a spin.

I figured out the Expanding Wilds feature by paying close attention when the headdress landed on the screen. When the headdress lands on the screen, the machine chooses a symbol to change to wild. If one of the tokens marching on the path around the screen is on a gold rectangle, the corresponding wild expansion takes place.

One token expands the wild up and down. Another right and left. A third diagonally from upper left to lower right. And the last from upper right to lower left.

There are four tokens and there are four gold rectangles. It's possible to have a wild expansion fill the whole screen with wild symbols. It happened to me twice. It pays $75 on a buck bet.

With apologies to Meat Loaf, three out of four ain't bad. I've figured out three of the four bonus features on the game. Three wheel symbols trigger the Bonus Wheel. Three Tut masks trigger the Free Games bonus. The headdress triggers Wild Transformation and the locations of the tokens may trigger Expanding Wilds.

The only feature left to figure out is the Lock & Respin feature. It rarely hits -- for me, at least -- so figuring out what triggers it is particularly difficult.

The rotating How-To-Win display says the this bonus is triggered by landing the headdress and a coin on a spin. But it seemed like the one time I had hit this bonus, the headdress was not on the screen, just a coin. I paid particular attention to spins with coins and spins with headdresses going forward..

After playing over 1000 spins, I finally figured out the answer to the question.

How do you trigger the Lock & Respin bonus on King Khufu? 42.

Actually, that's the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it's also pretty close to the number of ways a player can trigger the Lock & Respin bonus.

A spin with a headdress and a coin triggers the bonus. Spins with one or more coins and no headdress may also trigger the bonus when the coins fly up to the piles. Then the headdress magically appears on the screen to reveal which flavor of the bonus you won.

I checked the game's page on the IGT site. The section for Lock & Respin says that it is "triggered by mystery events, glowing coins, and catalyst combinations...." With so many ways to trigger it, you'd think the bonus would occur more often.

Now, you may ask, "Didn't you look at the help screens? You always tell us to look at the help screens."

I did look at the screens. Multiple times.

It's more likely that I will decipher the Rosetta stone than those help screens.

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