Benny the Beer Slot by Hacksaw Gaming

Stackways on Its Third Outing

Benny the Beer is the third game built on Hacksaw Gaming's Stackways engine, after Mayan Stackways and Ronin Stackways. The mechanic: special Stackways symbols land on a reel and fill it with 2 to 10 copies of a single paying symbol, picked automatically to create the best possible winning combination. A base grid of 5 reels and 4 rows gives you 1,024 starting ways. When Stackways fills multiple reels, that number climbs toward 100,000.

Two types exist. Normal Stackways stack 2, 3, or 4 symbols high. Revealing Stackways push further, from 5 through 10 symbols per reel. The distinction matters during free spins, where bigger stacks drive the biggest payouts.

No Wild symbol. Anywhere. That's unusual for a modern slot, and it's a deliberate choice - Stackways fills the role wilds normally serve by creating connections across reels through identical symbol stacking. The 37.79% hit frequency suggests the math model compensates well, with wins landing on better than one in three spins.

Book of Stackways and the Super Upgrade

Three scatter symbols trigger Book of Stackways: 10 free spins with 2 randomly chosen Special symbols. When a Special symbol lands on 3 or more reels simultaneously, those reels stack with that symbol. Indicators below each reel show the stack height, and stacked reels pay left to right. Land 4 scatters during this round and the game upgrades you to Super Book of Stackways with 4 extra spins added.

Super Book starts with 4 Special symbols instead of 2. Four scatters in the base game skip straight to this mode. Double the Specials means stacking triggers twice as often, and the 10,000x cap becomes a realistic target - though the probability of actually hitting it is around 1 in 10 million spins. Retriggers add +2 spins for 2 scatters, +4 for 3.

Five FeatureSpins Tiers

Hacksaw built a five-level buy menu. The pricing reveals each option's risk profile. BonusHunt FeatureSpins at 3x your bet just makes bonus triggers 5 times more likely during normal play. Cheap and gentle. Double Stack FeatureSpins (25x) guarantee at least 2 Stackways symbols per spin. Triple Stack (75x) guarantees 3, and the price jump reflects how much more aggressive each spin becomes.

The direct bonus buys sit at the top. Book of Stackways costs 120x. Super Book of Stackways costs 300x - so at a $2 bet, that's $600 for 10 free spins with 4 Special symbols. All five options run between 96.29% and 96.39% RTP, slightly above the base game's 96.17%. The FeatureSpins themselves are rated at the top end of the volatility scale, which creates an interesting contrast with the medium-volatility base game. You're essentially choosing your own risk level through the buy menu.

Cartoon Characters, Gentle Swings

Hacksaw Gaming built their name on aggressive slots like Wanted Dead or a Wild and Chaos Crew. Benny the Beer at 3/5 volatility is a different beast. The art direction matches the lighter mood: rubber-hose cartoon characters led by Benny himself (a pint glass with a handlebar mustache), joined by a bottle cap, an alarm clock, a camera, and a padlock. The forest biergarten setting is warm and colorful, closer to a children's cartoon than Hacksaw's usual edge.

Five high-pay symbols sit on the paytable, with Benny at the top paying 4x for five of a kind. All four card values (J, Q, K, A) pay identically at 0.7x for five, which simplifies the math during Stackways stacks. No multipliers exist in the game. Every big win comes from Stackways expanding reels and multiplying the number of active ways.

Players who've tried Mayan Stackways will find the core loop familiar - some reviewers describe Benny as a reskinned version of the original Stackways game with the Book mechanic layered on top. That criticism has some merit. The Stackways engine itself hasn't changed dramatically across three releases, and the theme swap from Mayan temples to beer gardens is mostly cosmetic. What separates Benny is the tiered bonus buy system and the Book/Super Book upgrade path, both of which add decision-making that the earlier Stackways games lacked.

RTP runs across four operator-configured tiers: 96.17%, 94.17%, 92.28%, and 88.26%. That nearly 8-point spread between highest and lowest is standard for Hacksaw.