Specs

5 Lions Reborn is a 2025 release from Pragmatic Play, and once again the “5 Lions” on the loading screen is doing a fair bit of heavy lifting. This is not the base 5 Lions. It is not 5 Lions Gold, either, and it is emphatically not one of the Megaways versions. Same festival family, same red-and-gold guardian-lion iconography, different machine underneath. What you actually get is a fixed 243-ways board on a plain 5×3 grid, built around one signature idea: a wild multiplier that refuses to sit still. It starts at whatever value your free-spins pick hands you, then ratchets upward whenever a lion joins a win and stays raised for the rest of the round. That one mechanic is why this title earned its own name. More importantly, it is what separates it from every other 5 Lions on the shelf.

Every figure in the table above came from the live AUD demo, played in fun-play through Pragmatic’s own gateway, so none of it has been lifted from a third-party listing. The 243 ways, five-bolt volatility meter, A$0.30 minimum bet, A$3.00 default and “WIN UP TO 5,000 X BET” splash were all taken straight from the game’s own screens. Two rows need a plain-English caveat before we go any further. The RTP reads 96.50% in this demo build, and Pragmatic typically ships a title like this in more than one config an operator can select, so take that figure as the demo default, not some cast-iron universal number. Then there is the layout row, which trips people up most. The game symbol carries a “vsways” tag, making it sound as though the ways might vary, but the grid stayed fixed at five reels by three rows on every single spin. This is 243 ways nailed shut, not a shifting Megaways board.

Symbols & paytable

The symbol ladder is standard Asian-fortune fare, just dressed up in gold. Chinese-fortune premiums sit at the top of the paying stack, while the usual card royals fill out the bottom. From the reels and splash, you can pick out a green guardian-lion mask as the top premium, then two dragons, one red and one gold, followed by a phoenix, a koi fish, a turtle and a green money toad through the mid-tier symbols. Under those sit the A, K, Q, J, 10 and 9 royals as the low pays. Nothing messy about it. The hierarchy is clean, and it behaves exactly as a 243-ways board should: matching symbols on adjacent reels from the leftmost reel pay a way, only the best win on each way counts, and multiple ways are added together.

Now for the honest bit about the numbers, because this particular build forced one. The UK free-play version comes with a stripped-back interface, and there is no reachable in-game paytable or Game Rules overlay to open. The information button behind the “i” only brings up system settings. The menu button does nothing. Rather than make up per-symbol cash prizes I could not verify on screen, the values below come from the game’s own initialisation config and are expressed in coins per combination, the same authoritative source used for the sibling 5 Lions dossiers. What matters here is the shape of the ladder, and the config makes that clear. The top premium returns 800 coins for a full five-of-a-kind, the dragons sit just below at 600 coins, then the figures taper through the mid symbols until the royals land at 40 coins. In practical terms, it gives you the usual high-volatility message: the top base-game symbol is worth roughly eight times the bet for a full line. Respectable, yes. Enough to carry a session on its own? Not remotely.

Two special symbols run the whole show. The wild is the golden guardian-lion and, unlike the wild on 5 Lions Gold, which is penned into the middle three reels, this one can appear on all five reels and substitutes for every paying symbol. It does not stand in for the scatters. In the base game, that wild is simply a coverage tool, helping complete more of the 243 ways. Keep the lion in mind, though. Once free spins begin, it becomes the single most important symbol on the machine. The scatters are where this title gets genuinely unusual, and they deserve a section of their own next.

Game rules

The fixed 243-ways base game

The base game runs on a fixed 5×3 grid, five reels by three rows, with 243 ways to win. There are no paylines to turn on and nothing to trim back. All 243 ways remain live on every spin. A way pays when matching symbols land on adjacent reels from the leftmost reel, no matter which rows they sit on, and only the best win on each way is counted. No tumbling, either. No cascade. No fresh symbols dropping into the reels after a win. One spin, one result, one payout. The only lever you control is the total stake, which the demo confirmed starts at A$0.30 and defaults to A$3.00.

• Five reels, three rows, 243 ways live on every spin, with nothing to toggle and no cascade or tumble mechanic.
• Symbols pay left to right from the leftmost reel, and only the highest win on each way is paid.
• The total stake is the only control, from A$0.30, defaulting to A$3.00, and there is no Ante Bet toggle in this build.

Three scatter tiers, one feature

Here is the wrinkle that separates 5 Lions Reborn from its stablemates. Most Pragmatic ways-pays titles use one scatter. This one has three: a regular yin-yang, a golden yin-yang and a super yin-yang. All three can land across the reels, and all three feed the same free-spins feature. On the reward side, they pay as ordinary scatters, with five paying 50x, four paying 15x and three paying 5x of total bet. The trigger side is where things get more interesting. The game splash states plainly that the super and golden scatters can also randomly trigger the free spins. So those higher-tier scatters are not merely bigger pays. They are extra doors into the feature.

• Three scatter symbols land on the reels: a regular yin-yang, a golden yin-yang and a super yin-yang.
• Scatter pays are 50x total bet for five, 15x for four and 5x for three.
• The scatters trigger the free-spins feature, and per the in-game splash the super and golden variants can randomly trigger it too, so the scatter tier you reach shapes how you get into the round.

The seven-option free-spins pick

Once the feature triggers, the game hands you a choice screen: “SELECT FREE SPINS AND WILD MULTIPLIER”. You pick one of seven options. Each one trades spin count against the starting wild multiplier, and the trade moves in a straight line: more spins means a lower starting multiplier, while fewer spins means a higher one. The choices are 20 free spins at a 2x start, 15 at 3x, 13 at 5x, a fourth Mystery option that hides both numbers until it plays out, 10 at 8x, 8 at 10x, and 6 free spins at a 15x start. This is the only genuine decision the game ever puts in front of you. It also turns out to be trickier than it looks, which is what the section below gets into.

The increasing wild multiplier

This is the headline mechanic, and the reason the game is called Reborn instead of being yet another 5 Lions. The number chosen on the option screen is only the starting multiplier. The in-game confirmation says “FREE GAME MULTIPLIER STARTS AT [your number]x. MULTIPLIER INCREASES WITH EVERY LION WIN”, and that is exactly what the reels do. Whenever a lion wild forms part of a winning combination during the round, the multiplier steps higher and stays there for the rest of the round. Down is not an option. I watched an Option-5 run begin at 8x, move to 16x, then hit 24x across a single round, while one free spin paid A$64.00 from a A$4.00 base win multiplied by the 16x live at that moment. That climb is the game’s whole engine. It also turns the option screen from a simple pick into a proper judgement call.

• The chosen number is the starting multiplier only, not a fixed one.
• Every lion-wild win during the round bumps the multiplier up a notch, and it stays raised, so a long run of wild-fed wins can send it a long way north of where it began.
• There is no tumble, no bonus-buy button and no Ante in this build, so the whole payout ceiling lives inside this feature and how far the multiplier climbs within it.

Screenshots

The three shots below are our own captures from the live AUD demo, so the mechanics can be checked directly in fun-play. Any balances shown on screen are demo credit, not staking advice, and because the demo runs in Australian dollars, those figures appear in A$. Each caption tells you exactly what is happening in the frame. The middle shot is the one to look at closely, though. Unlike plenty of Pragmatic captures, it shows a genuine free-spins round in progress rather than a base spin, with the increasing multiplier caught halfway through its climb.

Why a climbing multiplier changes the whole pick

In a normal free-spins game with a fixed multiplier, the option pick is arithmetic you can do in your head. Twenty spins at 2x against six spins at 15x is basically a straight variance choice, and the expected value of each option is more or less settled before the first reel turns. 5 Lions Reborn wrecks that tidy little sum. The multiplier does not stay where you set it. It only begins there. After that, every lion win pushes it higher, and the new value holds for the rest of the round. One fact, huge consequence. It rewires the whole choice, and it is worth slowing down here because this is the analytical heart of the game.

Think about what the two ends of the option list are really buying. The high-spin, low-start choices, 20 spins at 2x and 15 at 3x, give the multiplier the most time to climb. The opening number is small, sure, but you also get the most spins for lions to appear. Every lion that does show moves the number higher and keeps it there. This is the snowball route. You are backing a long round to ratchet the multiplier into meaningful territory, then hoping the back half of your spins lands while that number is already sitting high. At the other end, 8 spins at 10x and 6 at 15x give you a hot number straight away but barely any time to build on it, and barely any chances for a lion to appear and push things further. You start strong. Trouble is, you need the reels to cooperate fast because the round is almost over before it has properly begun.

That is a genuinely different calculation from a static-multiplier game, which is why neither end is obviously “better” in the way a fixed-multiplier choice can be. On a fixed game, the maths of the pick hardly shifts. Here, it bends with the way the round plays out. A progressive multiplier gives extra value to spin count because spin count is literally the fuel it uses to climb. That still does not make the low-start options some guaranteed winner. A cold run with no lions can leave a 2x sitting at 2x through twenty dead spins. The point is simply that the trade is more subtle than the raw numbers on the choice screen make it look. Treat it as nothing more than “spins versus multiplier” and you have missed the mechanic that gives the game its name.

What the three-scatter-tier system actually does

Three scatter types is unusual, so it pays to be precise about what the extra tiers actually buy. The game’s own splash is careful with the wording. All three yin-yang variants pay on the standard 50x, 15x, 5x scatter schedule for five, four and three. The golden and super scatters differ on the trigger side. According to the splash, they can randomly trigger the free spins, while the regular scatter uses the ordinary count-based route. Put another way, the higher tiers are not simply bigger pays stuck onto the same trigger system. They provide extra, semi-random ways into the feature, and that feature is where the entire ceiling lives.

For the player, the practical result is that the feature feels a touch less all-or-nothing than it would in a single-scatter game, simply because there is more than one way through the door. You are not relying only on landing a clean count of three matching scatters in one spin. Do not read too much into that, though. This remains a five-bolt high-volatility title. The feature is still a rare event, and the demo chewed through a long stretch of base spins before one finally triggered. The three-tier setup takes a little of the hard edge off the trigger and adds some texture to how a round begins. It does not magically turn a high-variance game into a friendly one. This is flavour around the trigger, not a rewrite of the odds.

High volatility, and what the base game is really for

Pragmatic’s in-game meter shows all five bolts filled, putting 5 Lions Reborn right at the top of the high-volatility band, and the demo played exactly that way. Across a long run of base spins at A$3.00, the feature triggered once. Between those moments, most wins were small and sat well below the stake, with plenty of dead spins mixed in. The base game is not what carries the bankroll here. The free-spins round does, along with however far the multiplier manages to climb inside it. That is textbook high-volatility construction: a plain grind paying for the wait until one big event turns up.

For an Australian punter, the practical read is a bit dull. That is precisely why it needs saying. Expect the drip. Those little sub-stake ways-wins are not the machine warming up, and they are not evidence that a trigger is due. The trigger is random. Nothing is ever owed. Small wins simply slow the bleed while you wait for a scatter. Start reading that drip as momentum, bump the stake because of it, and you have found one of the quickest ways to empty a wallet before the feature lands. On a five-bolt game, a long run of base spins with no trigger is completely normal, not a fault. Your stake therefore needs to fund a genuinely long stretch of spins, not a quick sprint.

It helps to keep RTP and volatility in separate boxes because punters mix them up all the time. The 96.50% is the long-run return measured across an enormous sample, basically the toll the game takes over time. Volatility is something else. It tells you how rough the ride can get while you are nowhere near that long-run sample, and on this title most of the punishment comes from grinding through the base game between triggers. One number describes the long-run cost. The other tells you how hard the short run can belt you around before you get anywhere close to it.

The 5,000x ceiling and where it actually lives

The splash promises “WIN UP TO 5,000 X BET”, and the number is real. Still, be honest about where it comes from. A 5,000x result is essentially a free-spins outcome, and more specifically one where the increasing multiplier has climbed high before premium or wild-heavy ways land across enough spins to build toward that ceiling. This is not a base-game figure. A lucky single spin does not just drop it in your lap. It sits at the far end of the feature, reached when the round lasts, the lions keep coming, the multiplier keeps rising and the reels actually pay into it while it is near its peak. Every part of the game’s construction points toward that same room.

That is the sensible way to think about the 5,000x. It sits at the top of the distribution, not anywhere near the middle, and the whole machine is designed so that ceiling becomes reachable only through the feature and only after the multiplier has climbed well. There is no bonus-buy in this build to skip the wait. No Ante to boost the trigger chance, either. So the ceiling stays locked behind a genuinely rare event with no paid express lane. The number is honest and the game will pay it, but treat it as the extreme edge of what a hot round can produce, not some target you can walk toward by raising the stake.

How Reborn differs from the other 5 Lions titles

The 5 Lions shelf is crowded and the names start blurring together, so let us be clear about what makes this one a separate machine. The shared thread is the festival theme and, across several titles, the seven-option free-spins pick. Reborn adds something the others do not use in the same way: an increasing wild multiplier that climbs with every lion win and stays raised, plus three separate scatter tiers feeding the trigger. It also runs as a fixed 243-ways game on a 5×3 grid, putting clear daylight between it and the Megaways versions.

• Against 5 Lions Gold: both are 243-ways titles with a seven-option pick, but Gold bolts on a Golden Reels jackpot layer and a Caishen pick, and its wild is locked to the middle three reels. Reborn drops the jackpot layer, puts the wild on all five reels, and makes the multiplier progressive rather than a per-spin random value.
• Against 5 Lions Megaways: that title is a six-reel Megaways game with a variable number of ways and tumbling reels. Reborn is the opposite structurally, a fixed 5×3, 243-ways board with no tumble at all.
• Against the base 5 Lions: the 2018 original established the seven-option pick, but Reborn is the version that makes the free-spins multiplier a climbing, progressive thing rather than a fixed or per-spin figure, which is the mechanic doing the real work here.

Pick by the mechanic, not by the shared name on the loading screen. Want a progressive multiplier that can snowball through a free-spins round on a fixed 243-ways board? That is this game. Want a jackpot layer and gated Caishen pick? That is 5 Lions Gold. Want a shifting Megaways board with tumbles? That is 5 Lions Megaways. They all come from the same Pragmatic back catalogue. What you are really choosing is the feature style, not the studio.

Provider and access context

Pragmatic Play is a Malta-based studio and one of the most widely distributed slot makers reaching Australian players, almost always through offshore casinos rather than a locally licensed venue. 5 Lions Reborn joined the studio’s long run of Asian-fortune ways-pays titles in 2025, and the legal backdrop is the same one facing every offshore RNG studio. It is worth putting that plainly because access and currency questions come up on nearly every AU-facing title under the Australian Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (the IGA 2001).

• Pragmatic Play is not licensed under the Australian Interactive Gambling Act 2001, because no offshore RNG slot studio is; AU players reach its titles only through offshore-licensed casinos.
• Accessing an offshore casino is not itself a criminal offence for the player under the IGA 2001; what the Act bars is operating or advertising real-money online slots to Australians locally.
• The demo on this page runs in AUD fun-play, so you can test the 243-ways base game and the increasing-multiplier free-spins feature yourself before deciding whether the high-variance profile suits you.

Demo notes

The demo on this page runs through Pragmatic’s own demo gateway. Every fresh load begins with new fun-play credits instead of a real balance, making it a clean way to see how the machine behaves before any result actually matters. Let the base game drip away for a while. Watch the golden lions drop across all five reels. Then, if you are patient enough to catch a scatter trigger, you finally get to the seven-option screen and the one real choice the game offers, followed by the multiplier getting on with its climbing act.

The gateway served the game in AUD and displayed A$ throughout, with the bet confirmed at an A$0.30 minimum and a A$3.00 default. Two points need to be made clearly. First, the RTP reads 96.50% in this build, and Pragmatic ships titles like this in more than one config, so that figure should be treated as the demo default rather than a universal number guaranteed at every operator. Second, this UK free-play build has a stripped interface with no reachable in-game paytable or Game Rules overlay. That means the 243 ways, volatility rating, three scatter tiers, 5,000x ceiling and seven free-spins options were taken from the game’s own splash and initialisation config, backed by live play, not scraped from a listing. The per-symbol values are therefore presented as the coin hierarchy from that config rather than fixed A$ prizes.

FAQ

Q: What makes 5 Lions Reborn different from the other 5 Lions games? A: The short answer is the increasing wild multiplier. It begins at whatever value your free-spins pick gives you, then rises with every lion win and stays raised. Throw in three scatter tiers and a fixed 243-ways board, and you have something clearly different from the jackpot-led Gold and the Megaways versions.

Q: How does the increasing multiplier work? A: Straight up, you choose a starting value on the seven-option screen, anywhere from 2x up to 15x. After that, every winning combination containing a lion wild bumps the multiplier up a step. The higher value then holds for the rest of the round, so a long run fed by wilds can push it well north of where it started.

Q: Is there a bonus-buy in 5 Lions Reborn? A: Not really. The game engine supports a bonus-buy in its configs, but this demo build never exposes a buy button anywhere in the interface, so there is no skipping the base-game wait here. This build does not have an Ante Bet toggle, either.

Q: What is the max win and the RTP? A: Look, the splash gives a top win of 5,000x total bet, reached inside the free spins after the multiplier has climbed well. RTP shows 96.50% in the demo, which is the default config. Pragmatic ships titles like this in several configs, though, so a given casino may be running a lower one.

Q: How volatile is it? A: Quick one: high. The in-game meter shows five of five bolts, and the demo behaved accordingly, grinding through a long run of small sub-stake wins before the feature triggered once. The entire payout ceiling sits inside the free-spins round, which leaves the base game feeling more like a waiting room.

Last updated: 5 Jul 2026 Reviewed by Mark Henderson, Senior Slots Analyst

Demo embed · played in fun-money mode. No real-money play here.