Wild Toro Walking Wilds: the bull lands on reel five and walks across to reel one

Step by step: one respin per reel, from five across to one

The sequence as operators describe it runs like this. The bull can land on reel five and nowhere else. When he does, the spin does not simply resolve: a respin is awarded, and the bull occupies the next reel to the left for it. Another respin follows, another step left, and so on. A clean trip from reel five to reel one is therefore worth four further respins, and the feature ends when the bull steps off the left-hand edge.

The reason this is better than it sounds on a ways grid is arithmetic rather than theatre. Each position the bull occupies is wild for every combination that can reach it, and the grid counts combinations by adjacency rather than by line, so a bull on reel three helps more potential wins than a bull on reel five. The feature gets stronger as it progresses, which is the opposite of how most wild features behave, and it is why the respin that puts him on reel two is the one worth watching.

More than one bull can be on the grid at the same time, which is the part players remember and reviews mention almost in passing. Two bulls walking at once do not take turns: both are wild, both step on each respin, and the respins continue while either of them is still on the board. That is also the mechanism behind the largest outcomes this game produces, and it is a far more honest explanation of the quoted ceiling than any sentence about volatility.

The five lines below are how operators running the title and British reviews describe the feature. The studio's own page states that the bull walks from reel to reel and generates respins, without giving the reel numbers.

Where the bull lands

reel five onlyoperators

What a landing is worth

a respin, with the bull one reel further leftoperators

Direction of travel

right to left, towards reel oneoperators

End of the feature

when the bull steps off past reel oneoperators

More than one bull

possible; both walk, and respins continue while either remainsreviews

Why the trail is the point, and not the single wild

A standard wild substitutes once and is gone. A sticky wild stays in one place. A walking wild is a third thing: it changes the state of the board over several evaluations, so the interesting question is never what it did on arrival but where it will be in two respins' time. The studio's phrase for the result — a long path of wilds — is exact. What the bull leaves behind is not a memory of where he was; on the charge, those squares are wild while the sequence runs.

This is also what makes the game watchable without any numbers on the screen. A player does not have to know the paytable to understand that a bull two reels from the edge is a better position than a bull that has just arrived, because the picture itself says so. Very few slot mechanics manage that. Most require the player to have learned something before the animation means anything, and this one does not.

It is worth being precise about what the trail does not do. It does not multiply, it does not persist into the next paid spin, and it does not accumulate across features. The second game in the series added progressive multipliers to its walking wilds and the third added multiplier wilds outright; the original has none of that. The trail here is wide rather than tall, and reading a sequel's multiplier rules onto this game is the single commonest mistake made about it.

When the matador is in the way: the charge, and what it leaves behind

If a matador symbol is on the board while the bull is walking, the walk becomes a charge, and that is the bonus the studio named Toro Goes Wild. Operators describe the bull marching towards the matador, turning the squares he crosses wild, and then resuming his ordinary leftward progress once the matador is dealt with. One bull can see off several matadors in a single sequence, and each one it reaches extends the trail rather than ending it.

The thematic framing is doing real work here, because the two behaviours would otherwise be hard to tell apart on screen: one step to the left looks much like another. The charge is visually distinct — direction, speed, dust — so a player can see that this respin is a different kind of respin without reading a word. The studio has published a note about how many sketches the matador's frightened expression took, which only makes sense as an investment if the matador's role is to be instantly recognisable as a target.

The bonus page on this site goes through the trigger conditions and the second named feature in full, because the two interlock: the respin challenge makes the bull appear far more often, and a bull appearing while matadors are stuck on the middle reels is precisely the situation the charge needs.

Shifting wilds, walking wilds, wild trails: three names, one mechanic

Reviews of this game use all three phrases and sometimes two of them in a paragraph. A gameplay video from the year of release calls the bull a Shifting Wild Bull; the studio's own feature list says walking wilds; several operators write about the wild trail. They are describing the same thing from three angles — the symbol moves, the symbol walks, the squares behind it are wild — and nothing is gained by treating them as separate features to look for.

The reason the vocabulary matters at all is that these phrases are how a mechanic gets found. Somebody who liked this game and wants another one like it will go looking for walking wilds, and will find a few dozen titles with the words attached to half a dozen quite different behaviours — wilds that move one reel per spin, wilds that drift until they expire, wilds that only move inside a bonus round. This game's version is at the simple end of that range, and the simplicity is most of why it has lasted.

The one distinction that does matter is between this mechanic and sticky wilds, because both appear in this game and they belong to different characters. The bull moves. The matadors, once they have triggered the respin challenge, stay exactly where they are until the feature ends. A page that calls the matadors walking, or the bull sticky, has them the wrong way round, and it is an easy error to make from a screenshot.

What this mechanic became in the two later games

The walking wild is the one idea ELK carried into every Toro title, and watching what happened to it is the clearest way to see what the Wild Toro of 2016 is. In Wild Toro 2 the grid grows — five reels and five rows that stretch to eight — and matadors of two kinds move as well as the bull, with the golden ones carrying a multiplier that rises as they travel. The headline feature has a different name there: Toro Goes Berserk, plus the paid X-iter entries.

In Wild Toro 3 the bull still lands on reel five and still walks left, and the studio's own description of that game adds a multiplier that increases with every step taken. It also adds volatility modes, multiplier wilds and a Golden Rose bonus. Its grid is five reels by four rows like the original's, which is exactly why the grid alone is no longer enough to tell the two apart.

So the markers for the original are the plain ones. Fixed 178 ways. No multiplier on the trail at all. No mode menu, no purchased entry, no expanding board. One bull — or occasionally two — walking across a board that never changes shape. If a description you are reading includes a growing multiplier or a choice of volatility, it is about one of the sequels.