Nian Nian You Yu Slot by Playtech

Nian Nian You Yu, a New Year greeting that means something like "surplus year after year," is one of Playtech's older Chinese New Year slots from 2015. It's a small, cheerful game: 5x3 reels on just 9 fixed lines, packed with festive icons like a dragon-dance and lion-dance head, oranges, red envelopes, dumplings, noodles, firecrackers and lanterns. A wild substitutes for everything, and the return is generous for its age at 97.03%.

The dragon is the symbol to watch. It tops the paytable and, unusually, pays even for a single one on a line, five of them worth 10,000x your line bet. Worth being clear about that number, though: line bet is your stake split across the 9 lines, so five dragons works out closer to 1,100x your total bet rather than the headline 10,000. The lion head behind it pays well too. It's a straightforward line-pay game with no cascades or clever mechanics.

There's also no free-spins round, which is unusual, because the game puts all its feature weight into the Dragon Jackpot instead. This is Playtech's four-tier progressive, Green, Blue, Red and Gold, that can trigger at random on any spin. When it does, it opens a pick game that guarantees one of the four jackpots, the Gold tier seeding around 20,000. Like all progressives it shows "Not available" in the free Playtech demo, since it only pays for real money.

So the demo here is really about the base game, the festive theme and that high 97.03% RTP rather than the top prize. It's dated and simple, and nine lines with no bonus round won't hold everyone's attention, but as a Chinese New Year slot with a strong return and a progressive on top, it's a pleasant few spins for free.