Game in Action
Screenshot of the Chinese New Year Slot
There’s no doubt that Chinese New Year is another beautiful slot from Play’n GO. It may not be as elegant as Royal Masquerade or as magnificent as Cloud Quest, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. The symbols represent the Chinese Zodiac, including the two scatters (monkey and dragon) and the tiger wild.
The background sound is supplied by what is easily identified as oriental or Chinese music. It has a calming effect and provides a nice ambient soundtrack that won’t grind on your nerves. You’ll also notice a prevalence of the colour red in this slot, which is the colour of good fortune and joy according to the Chinese.
The slot comes with only 15 paylines, but that means it’s not too hard on the budget, because you can spin away from just 0.15 coins and won’t be tempted to spend more than 18.75. There’s nothing wrong with a slot that doesn’t burn through your money.
Bonuses
In the base game you’ll be mostly interested in seeing the wild as much as possible. If you get the cheeky tiger 5 times on a payline, he will pay out 5,000 times your line bet, which is the highest single win possible.
Then there’s the dragon scatter. Interestingly this one only shows up on reel 3, 4 and 5. When you get the dragon on those reels, the click me bonus will be triggered. You’ll be looking at 5 Chinese fireworks and can pick each and every one of them. One of them is a dud, however, so be careful to pick that one last. This feature triggers more easily than the free spins and you’ll be glad to see it. Wins can be pretty random and you may pick the dud much sooner than you would have liked.
Contrary to what you might expect, the monkey scatter does not appear on reel 1, 2 and 3, instead it will land on reels 1, 3 and 5. And it doesn’t do so very often, which is a bit of a disappointment. But when you do get it, you’ll first find yourself in front of a wheel of fortune. The little monkey is jumping around on the left-hand side and the wheel determines which of the base game symbols (the zodiac animals except for monkey, dragon and tiger) will become an additional scatter. The wheel also randomly assigns the number of free spins you’ll receive.
If you get a higher value scatter, you’ll get a smaller number of spins. The reason being that whenever three or more scatters show up on the reels, those scatter will expand to cover the entire reel, which will give you some pretty good winnings.
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Summary
Chinese New Year is not a very volatile slot. You’ll win frequently, but generally small amounts. The bonus features are where the money is, unless the tiger wild makes a fortuitous appearance. That means you can play this slot for quite some time before your budget is seriously in peril.
And you will be doing just that, because the free spins are hard to trigger. They are worth it when the extra scatters end up expanding. If it weren’t for the click me bonus, Chinese New Year would likely be a lot more volatile. It’s a fun little slot, which is quite beautiful to look at and you won’t soon get bored with it.
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