Lucky Porker Bonus Buy Slot Review

Four options. The Bonus Game at 32x total bet, or 6, 10 and 20 free spins at 42x, 72x and 144x. Evoplay prints none of these prices publicly and no per-option return figures at all, so from the outside the menu looks like a plain escalator: pay more, get more spins.

It isn't one. Divide the prices out and the gross cost per free spin runs 7.00x, 7.20x, 7.20x, which is lumpy in a small way. But a purchase is settled by an actual spin, one that comes in with 3 to 5 Scatters, and Scatters carry that instant pay of 2x, 5x or 10x. If that pay is credited on the buying spin, which the wording implies without ever confirming it, the net costs are 40x, 67x and 134x. Per spin that is 6.667x, 6.700x, 6.700x. Flat to within a rounding error, with the six-spin tier fractionally the cheapest of the three.

Which makes the next number the one that matters. The 6-spin buy returns 96.18%. The 10 and 20 spin buys both return 95.82%. That is 0.36 of a percentage point separating options that cost the same per spin, and the 6-spin tier is the only purchase in either edition of this game that pays back more than a base game does, 96.18% against 96.01% here and 96.03% next door. Since the pricing is essentially flat, the gap is not coming from the price. It is in how the rounds themselves are configured, and Evoplay explains nothing about why a short bought round should be built better than a long one.

The practical version: buy the six, over and over, rather than buying the twenty once. Twenty spins in a single click costs a shade more per spin and pays back a third of a point less for the convenience.

The Bonus Game buy sits outside all of that arithmetic. At 32x it is the cheapest thing on the menu and it returns 95.99%, a hair under the base game, for direct access to the only round in the game that can reach 3,000x. It also does something no one mentions: the purchase lands 5 to 7 Piggy symbols, not a flat 5, and every triggering Piggy converts into a Fortune Coin before a single shot is fired. Buy it and you might start on 5 coins, worth 7x, or on 7, already worth 30x. On a ladder this steep, the distance between those two starting points is most of what you paid for.

Five or more Piggies anywhere on a main game spin start it. The triggering Piggies turn into Fortune Coins, then Piggies fill all 20 positions and you shoot three of them. Behind each one is another Fortune Coin, a cash prize of 3x, 4x, 5x or 6x total bet, or +2 Shots. Cash prizes are held back and added to the coin prize when the round ends.

The ladder pays 7x at five coins, 15x at six, 30x at seven, 60x at eight, 120x at nine, then 300x, 1,000x and 3,000x for ten, eleven and twelve. Each of the last two rungs triples the one below it. Three shots against a 20 position board means most rounds settle on the bottom rungs, and the only route upward is the +2 Shots prize. That prize loops, so a good run keeps extending itself instead of ticking down to zero, and that escalation is the smartest thing in the round.

Three, four or five Scatters pay 2x, 5x or 10x and award 6, 10 or 20 spins. For the whole round every low symbol comes off the reels, leaving Mr. Joker and the four high symbols, which changes what the reels can produce rather than just dressing the round differently. There is no retrigger. And because Scatter and Piggy appear in the main game only, a free spins round can never turn into a Bonus Game. The two features never meet.

Mr. Joker substitutes for everything except Scatter and Piggy, and a full line of him pays at the top symbol's rate, so five is 100x. That is the base game's ceiling. Against a bonus that reaches 3,000x it explains what the reels are for: finding Piggies and Scatters. The gem tokens land often enough at a 24% hit rate, but 0.3x for three of a kind barely registers on the balance.

The non-buy Lucky Porker is this game without the menu, released twelve days earlier, with the same paytable, the same ladder and the same 3,000x cap. It returns 96.03% on a normal spin against 96.01% here. Two hundredths of a point is the ordinary rent for having the button on screen, and it is small enough to ignore unless you never plan to press it.

There is one genuine oddity in the paperwork. This buy edition is certified for Ontario and the base edition is not, which runs backwards to the usual arrangement, where the purchase button is the first thing a regulated market takes away.