Pirots

How Pirots plays

Pirots is the game that started ELK Studios’ most popular series. On a 5x5 grid, four birds, one for each gem colour, move around and collect gems of their own colour, clearing space for new symbols to drop in. ELK calls this CollectR: each gem pays its value as long as its colour matches the bird that picks it up, however many are collected. Every collection can set up the next, so one spin can run for a long time.

Each collected symbol fills a feature meter. When it is full, three chests award feature symbols: coin wins, wilds, a grid expander that grows the board, symbol upgrades, symbol transforms or bonus symbols. Three bonus symbols collected in one round start the bonus game, where grid size, gem win levels and the feature meter carry over from spin to spin. Later Pirots games build on this loop with new features, but the core idea is already all here.

Volatility in practice

ELK rates it 7 of 10. About one spin in 3.7 pays something (26.8% hit frequency on the data sheet), but most of the return sits in long collection chains and the expanded grid. Sessions can still swing hard. Later titles in the series, such as Pirots 4, smoothed the base game with extra features; the original is rawer.

X-iter

ELK’s X-iter menu offers five paid modes where the market allows it, from 3x the bet with more than four times the normal chance of a bonus to a 500x Super Bonus that starts at maximum grid size. A paid mode raises the cost per round without improving the RTP.

RTP settings

ELK’s data sheet gives 94.0%, the studio’s default for the series. At €1 spins over 1,000 spins, that is an expected cost of about €60, noticeably more than a 96% game. Lower operator settings may exist, so the info panel is the figure that applies. The max win is 10,000x on the same sheet; a public listing that showed 20,000x was wrong.