Treasure-snipes: Christmas Bonus Buy Slot Review

A pirate longship strung with garlands and fairy lights, crewed by skeletons in Santa hats. That is the whole idea, and Evoplay does not stretch it any further than it needs to go. Under the tinsel sits a 5x3 game on 20 fixed lines where the paying symbols barely matter and the gift-wrapped chests matter enormously.

Six of those chests anywhere on the first four reels open the Bonus Game, a collect-and-respin round where every chest holds a cash value or a jackpot. Fill all twelve positions and the fifth reel finally wakes up as the Grand Reel, which is the only route to the 4,000x GRAND and the only place a multiplier can strike every chest on the board at once. That one spin is the game.

The Bonus Buy on the title is doing honest work. Two buttons at two prices, 32x total bet for the free spins and 28x for the Bonus Game, both running at 96.00% rather than the 95.94% you get spinning by hand. The plain Christmas edition is the identical game with those buttons taken away.

The reels sit inside the hull of a longship, serpent-headed posts curling up on either side, snow banked on the brass cannons, lantern windows glowing yellow in the dark. Fir branches hang along the top edge, a garland runs across the reel frame, and four blue cloth banners above it hold the MINI, SUPER, GRAND and MEGA meters. Behind all of it: black-blue night sky, drifting snow, a flat calm sea.

The symbol set is where the festive conversion actually lands. Card suits have turned into glass baubles (pink heart, blue diamond, purple club, green spade), and above them sit a rolled treasure map tied with holly, a silver anchor wound with lit candles, and an elf peering out of a fur-trimmed stocking. The premiums are a black-bearded captain in a red coat and eyepatch, framed like an oil painting, and a girl in a blue bandana leaning out of a cabin window with a candy cane. Best of the lot is the Scatter, a grinning skull in a Santa hat with a cutlass propped behind it. The chests are gold under a fat red ribbon.

The ship frame takes up more room than the reels do, mind you.

Line wins are smaller than the paytable makes them look, because those numbers are per line. Twenty lines in play means a full row of five captains, the best regular combination in the game, hands back five times your stake. Everything below that is loose change. The base game is not trying to pay you, it is trying to get chests onto the board.

Around 29% of spins land something, so the balance drifts down slowly rather than falling off a cliff, and the drift is broken by the moment two or three chests thud into place and you start counting. Nothing else in the base game raises the pulse.

The collect round is what people remember, and usually not fondly. Stalling on ten or eleven chests with the Grand Reel sitting there greyed out happens far more often than filling the board does, and the counter resetting to three every time a chest lands makes each near miss last long enough to hurt. When the board does complete, the pause before that fifth reel spins is genuinely tense (this is the one thing the game does better than most of its shelf-mates). The four jackpot banners glowing overhead the whole time are pure theatre, and they work.

Play it unbought and you will probably spend a long stretch watching baubles that pay nothing. The buy turns the session into a series of discrete bets on one bonus at a time, which suits this game far better than grinding does.

Evoplay had one good idea here and dressed it for December. The Grand Reel is a smart bolt-on to a hold and win format that had gone stale years ago, and giving the top jackpot a single dedicated route makes the twelve-chest chase mean something. It is also the only interesting thing in the game. The 20-line base game exists to deliver chests and does nothing else, the RTP sits below where a high-volatility title should sit, and the buy prices are steep enough that a run of empty bonuses gets expensive fast.

If you already like the original, the Christmas paint job is charming and the mechanics are untouched, so treat it as the same game with better wallpaper. As seasonal reskins go it is one of the better ones, which is a smaller compliment than it sounds.