Twin Owls: open the cameos, find the pairs

The star of the poster is not an owl at all. It is Margot, a magpie in a lace headpiece and a string of pearls, clutching a ruby and a scrap of red velvet with the look of someone who has just helped herself. She lives in Madame Isaure's workshop, where the night's work is laid out on a tray of twenty closed cameos. Twin Owls, by Nocturn Play, is a pick-and-match instant game, and you can play Twin Owls free right here with no sign-up.

How a round of Twin Owls works

Choose your bet and press Play. A round costs one bet and gives you eight cameos to open. Tap the ones you fancy, press Open all, or tap Margot and let her choose for you. Under each lid is an owl brooch, a Moon Eye or simply empty velvet.

• Two identical owls make a pair and pay that owl's prize.
• A third identical owl turns the pair into three of a kind, worth four times the pair prize.
• A Moon Eye gives you two more cameos to open.

The owls go up in value from the Topaz Owl and Pearl Owlet through the Moonstone, Onyx and Amethyst Eagle-Owl to the Ruby Barn Owl and the Sapphire Snowy Owl. The prize table in the help screen shows each one at your current bet.

The Night Collection and the Golden Twin Owls

Two features lift the game above a simple memory match. Find pairs of three different owls in the same round and the Night Collection kicks in: every pair of that round pays double. A counter at the top of the screen tracks your progress, so you always know when one more pair would trigger it.

The other is the jackpot moment. There are two Golden Twin Owls hidden among the cameos on some trays. Open one and the game tells you to find its twin; open both and the pair pays 2,000× the bet, the maximum win of the game. There is no bonus buy in Twin Owls, so every golden pair has to be found the honest way.

Does it matter which cameo you open?

No, and the game is upfront about it. The tray is set the moment the round starts, so picking left or right, quickly or slowly, changes nothing. At the end, the cameos you left closed flip over to show the rest of the tray. That reveal is oddly useful in a demo: after twenty or thirty rounds you get a feel for how many Moon Eyes and golden owls actually turn up, and how often a third owl was sitting one lid away.

Getting the most from the free version

Play your first rounds by hand to enjoy the reveal, then switch to Open all or Autoplay. Autoplay has a stop-on-big-win setting, handy if you want to pause on the interesting rounds. Turbo shortens the animations. Because each round is short, 200 rounds in the demo take only a few minutes and give a fair picture of how often the Night Collection lands. The tray works nicely in portrait on a phone, with big cameos to tap.

The demo balance is made of virtual credits with no value. The same game runs for real money at the casinos below.