Funky Fruits Jackpot Slot by Playtech

The reason to pick this over the plain Funky Fruits is the jackpot bolted on top. It's a shared network progressive, one of those pools that swells into seven figures across every casino running the game, and its biggest single drop came in north of three million dollars. Worth knowing up front, though: it reads "Not available" in the free demo and only lives in real-money play, so the version you spin here can never hand it over.

Everything else is stripped right back. No wild, no free spins, no bonus round, nothing to buy. You win by landing five or more of the same grinning cartoon fruit anywhere on the board, and where they sit doesn't matter at all, only how many turn up. The more that land, up to sixteen of a kind, the bigger the pay, and the top line of the whole game is sixteen lemons. Cherries are the odd one out, a rare high-value fruit that pays off far smaller counts than the rest. When a fruit wins it clears away and new ones drop into the gaps, so one spin can chain into a second or third hit as the crate refills.

The setting is a lazy summer beach bar. A wooden fruit crate standing on the sand doubles as the reels, a yellow surfboard propped on one side and a tall iced cocktail with a paper umbrella on the other, the sea flat and blue behind. Cherries, lemon, orange, pineapple, plum and watermelon all wear cartoon faces, most of them mid-grin. It's a 2014 game and it plays like one. The returns run lean next to anything modern, and with no features to speak of, the whole thing rides on those count-pays, the cascades and a jackpot you can't touch for free.