Irish Weekend Bonus Buy Slot Review

An enchanted Irish forest, a pipe-smoking leprechaun, and not a single payline anywhere. Wins come from a Magic Catcher, a Celtic-knotted frame that drops onto the 5x4 grid in a different shape and a different spot every round, paying only what it happens to land on. This is the buy edition of Irish Weekend, out about five weeks after the original in April 2023, and the mechanics are carried over wholesale. The full walkthrough of how the Catcher, the wheel and the Fishpots hang together lives on that page.

What is new is the button welded to the left rail, and it deserves more scrutiny than a buy button usually gets. Four options sit behind it: 10, 15 or 20 free spins, or one solitary Ultra Spin. The prices are low. The value, though, runs backwards to the order the menu presents them in, and the single-spin option priced a unit above the ten-spin option is the sharpest illustration of that.

There is no reel frame. Symbols hang in open water against a floodlit waterfall that fills the middle of the layout, which looks lovely and takes a few rounds to read, since nothing marks where the grid actually is until the Catcher lights up. That frame is gold, cornered with Celtic knotwork, with the word WIN stamped underneath it. Along the top ledge the three Fishpot values glow on painted rock: MEGA in green, SUPER in gold, MINI in pink.

The leprechaun sits on the left bank the whole session, red-bearded, green top hat, green waistcoat over a white shirt, drawing on a clay pipe with the smoke drifting across him. Around him the forest does the heavy lifting: teal glowing mushrooms on the right bank, ferns, moss-slicked rock, shafts of light through the canopy. The trinket symbols are nicely painted rather than clever, an olive top hat with playing cards and a clover brooch tucked in the band, a Celtic-knotted beer stein with foam on top, a round copper pot of gold, a pale teal four-leaf clover.

The fish are the strange part, and the reason the theme never quite settles. They drift through in gold, violet and deep red with their cash values printed straight across their bodies, redrawn every round, so colour tells you less than the number stamped on the fish. A leprechaun watching koi swim past a waterfall is not a combination anyone was asking for, and the art never really reconciles it. It is pretty. It is also two themes in a trench coat.

Rounds resolve fast because there is almost nothing to read. Symbols land, the frame lights up somewhere, and you look at one thing: what got caught. That gives the game an unusually low cognitive load, and it also makes it repetitive quicker than most. A 37% hit rate sounds generous until you notice how many of those hits are one trinket at 0.2x inside a single-cell frame, which is a win in the same sense that finding a coin in the sofa is income.

The medium-low volatility shows up as slow erosion rather than a cliff. Balance drifts down in small increments, punctuated by the occasional row or full-reel frame landing across a couple of mid fish for something in the 20x to 40x range. That rhythm is fine for a long session and thin for a short one.

Purchased rounds feel different, and not always in the direction you paid for. Fish-only reels mean every landing is worth something, so the frustration flips from empty grids to small frames. A two-cell frame over two bottom fish returns 2x on a round that cost 25x, and it happens more than the price tag prepares you for. What you are actually fishing for is a gold fish carrying the Super sitting under a frame large enough to include it, and a longer purchased round mostly buys more attempts at that one prize. Ten spins or twenty, the ceiling never moves.

The buy menu is wide and cheap, and exactly one button on it is priced correctly. Ten free spins for 25x at 96.01% is the only option that beats sitting there spinning, and it happens to be the one at the bottom of the price list. Everything above it costs more and returns less, which is a rare thing to be able to say plainly about a buy menu, mostly because nobody publishes the numbers that let you say it.

The Ultra Spin is not a trap so much as a different bet, and an honest one if you know what you are taking on. A unit more, a fraction less back, and the entire round collapsed into one result. Some players want that. It should just be a choice made on purpose rather than because it sits next to the ten-spin button looking similar.

As a game underneath all that, it is lighter than its ceiling suggests. The Catcher keeps the base game watchable and the Fishpots give the top fish weight, but 3,120x is the Super Fishpot and nothing else, so the upside is one specific event rather than a build. For my money the original at 96.06% is the better version to play, and this one is the better version to buy from, provided you only press the first button.