Where's the Gold characters: who you can pick and what the pick decides

What the pick gives

Free games (nuggets) and gold wild symbols

Most you can win

Up to 10 free games and up to 3 gold wilds

Characters to choose from

5 in the Cash Express Luxury Line version (Aristocrat); 5 in the classic per review sites

Names from Aristocrat

None found

Names most review sites agree on

Happy Lucky, Winnie Fortune, Mary Money

Best character

Aristocrat's rules don't name one

What the pick does

Aristocrat described the feature in its online showroom back in the early 2010s: “The Player selects a character to find Free Games and WILD symbols for them (each symbol collected turns all occurrences of that symbol WILD during the Free Games)” [1].

The rules of the online version spell out the mechanics [2]:

• “Select a character. The selected character is denoted with a spotlight.”
• “The number of free games won is equal to the number of NUGGET appearing in the window directly below the spotlight.”
• The symbols in that window turn into their gold versions on the reels, and “GOLD SYMBOLS are WILD and substitute for all symbols except scattered DYNAMITE.”
• “WIN up to 10 Free Games and up to 3 wild gold symbols.”

So every character hides the same two kinds of prize: nuggets, which count as free games, and symbols, which go gold and wild. The step-by-step walk-through is on the free spins feature page.

How many characters there are

For the Cash Express Luxury Line version, Aristocrat says it directly: “players get the choice in selecting 1 character from 5 options and collect between 3 – 10 free games and/or 1, 2 or 3 Symbols” [3]. For the classic, the online rules don’t state a number; every review site we read lists five.

The Jackpot Carnival Deluxe version released in April 2024 keeps the pick. A trade article on its launch says “the free game feature is the same as the original game”, with 3 to 10 free games and one, two or three symbols, and adds a clown that can turn the chosen symbols into cash prizes [4].

The names review sites use

None of Aristocrat’s documents we found names the characters. Review sites do, but not consistently: across nine sites and one video we found seven names, each site listing five in its own line-up.

The first three are the ones most sources agree on. The rest appear in some line-ups and not in others, which is why we haven’t printed a single “official five”. We’ll add the full line-up once we have a screenshot of the pick screen.

Is one character better?

Aristocrat’s rules don’t say so. They describe what’s behind a character, nuggets and symbols, up to 10 free games and up to 3 gold wilds, and nothing about one character paying more than another. Review sites contradict each other on this point: some say one character tends to give more spins, others say every pick is random. We haven’t seen evidence either way that we could check, so we don’t recommend a character. The cheats and tips page explains why a pick pattern can’t be learned from a run of features.

The prospector

The bearded prospector on the game’s logo is also its top-paying symbol: five on a played line pay 1,000 times the bet per line, which is $10 on a 1 cent line bet, and even two pay 4 times. Review sites give him a name too, but Aristocrat doesn’t, so we don’t either. The full table is on the paytable page.