Chilli Xtreme: PowerPlay Jackpot Slot by Playtech

The whole board breathes here. It starts at 4,096 ways across six reels, and the thing that makes it swell is the flaming HOT chilli. Whenever one lands, every symbol touching it, above, below, left and right, gets blown off the grid. The wild, the maraca-shaking señorita and the piñata bonus all survive the blast, along with the chillies themselves, but everything else in the neighbourhood goes. Then the reels grow a row taller. Each explosion adds another row, so the grid climbs from four rows up to eight and the ways balloon from 4,096 to 262,144. It keeps stacking as long as fresh explosions keep landing, which is where the runaway spins come from.

Wins pay in ways, three or more matching symbols on consecutive reels from the left. The green-eyed señorita is the exception, she pays from just two. The wild is a chilli pepper and stands in for everything except the piñata bonus and the hot chillies, so it can stretch a way-win but never fakes a bonus trigger.

Three or more piñata BONUS symbols open the Free Games, and landing three more mid-round tacks on another three spins. Above all of it sit the PowerPlay progressives, Mega, Peak and Mini, three network pools shared across every casino running the game. A slice of every bet feeds them and they drop at random, with nothing to line up. They're real-money linked, so in the demo all three read UNAVAILABLE, the mechanic without the payout.

The setting is a Mexican street party, bunting and papel-picado banners strung above the reels, piñatas and market stalls behind them, the palette all warm fiesta orange, red and green. The cast fits it, a mustachioed mariachi, a loaded taco, a wide-eyed chihuahua in a sombrero, and a lower tier of fresh produce running through avocado, jalapeño, bell peppers, eggplant, onion and garlic. No buy button and no ante bet, so the only route into those giant grids is to keep the chillies exploding on their own. The ceiling works out to around 10,000x.