Fire Blaze: Fire Fighter Slot by Playtech

The red FIRE ALARM discs are the ones to watch, and you need a pile of them: eight to twenty landing on a single spin locks the Fire Blaze Hold & Respin. Every bell sticks in place, you get three respins, and each fresh bell that drops resets the count back to three. What matters is what happens to the discs sitting next to each other. Adjacent bells fuse into one larger MEGA bell, and the bigger the fused block, the bigger the cash reveal underneath it. A block that fills the entire 4x5 grid hands over the Grand at 2,000x total bet. Below that sit the Major at 500x, Minor at 100x and Mini at 20x, all fixed, none progressive.

Three of the white Fire Fighter flags anywhere open the Free Games, six of them to start, and this is where the flames come in. On each spin one or more positions catch fire, and before the reels settle those flames decide what they are: a Wild or another Fire Bell. Stack up eight or more bells in one free spin and you drop into the Hold & Respin from inside the round. Three more flags along the way add another six spins. The Wild is the crossed-axes firefighter badge, and it pays as the top symbol. In the base game it only turns up on reels 2 through 5, but during Free Games it can land anywhere, which is why the transforming flames hit harder in the bonus.

Everything sits on the front of a pink-brick firehouse, white service flags hanging either side, the reels boxed in red hose and brass piping with the four jackpot bars strung across the top. The cast is a moustached firefighter, a Dalmatian in a red bandana, a vintage red fire engine, a black-and-gold helmet and a brass extinguisher, with gold royals down the low end. It's a Rarestone build in the Fire Blaze mould and it plays like one. No buy button, so that eight-bell minimum means the Hold & Respin can stay out of reach for long stretches, and the Free Games end up the more realistic way in.