Ready to Blow: Thundershots Slot by Playtech

Ready to Blow is a cartoon gold-mine slot, its 5x3 reels sitting inside a rusty mine cart on the rails, framed by glowing crystals and piled ore. A bug-eyed old prospector with a canary on his hat is the wild and the top payer, worth 15x your bet for five. Mine carts of gems, a lantern and a gold bell fill out the higher symbols over gem-cut royals, and a sparking red dynamite bundle is the scatter. It's a Playtech game from the Psiclone studio, part of their Thundershots range, and it plays at a fairly even medium volatility.

The base game keeps busy with Exploding Wilds. At random, a full-reel stacked miner wild, or sometimes a stacked double wild, blasts onto the reels, and a whole column of wilds tends to line up several paylines at once. There's no jackpot here, so these random wilds and the features are where the wins come from.

Three dynamite scatters trigger 10 free games, and the round has a nice hook. Every win on the reels lights up dynamite sticks, and each lit stick then explodes to reveal a cash prize on top of the line win. Better still, finding a diamond nugget levels you up through a series of stages and resets your remaining spins back to 10, so a good run can keep extending itself all the way to a final Gold stage.

Reach that Gold stage and find one more diamond, and the Thundershots wheel can fire: a bonus wheel of instant cash, extra free games and a central multiplier. The marketed max win is 7,500x your stake, though the theoretical ceiling is quoted as high as 15,633x. One thing to check before playing for real: the default RTP is around 95.5%, but this is a Playtech title operators can run lower, as far down as 93.08%. As a mining demo, the exploding wilds and the level-up free games make it a lively one.