To celebrate the arrival of the Festive Season, we’re taking a look at our three favourite Christmas-themed Spina Zonke games!
1. Santa’s Village (Habanero)
Santa’s Village employs unconventional mechanics that lead to some of the coolest bonus features of any Spina Zonke game, but more on those later. The game doesn’t make use of traditional paylines either. Simply match three or more symbols horizontally across any of the five reels and you’re a winner!
Symbols you’re going to want to look out for? The Christmas Present is the WILD symbol and can substitute for all other symbols. The Santa symbol is required to trigger a top-class feature. It fires from any win in the base game derived by two matched symbols featuring a Santa.
When triggered, the camera will pan away to a map made up of markers and buildings. Every time the feature is triggered Santa will move one space for every triggering “Santa” symbol. Once he arrives at house/building (indicated by the larger map marker), he will toss out a present which will initiate a feature/mini-game.
This event can be triggered repeatedly. There are a few important things to remember when Santa makes his way around the map:
- He can’t walk back to his last occupied spot
- If more than one direction is available, he will move in one direction at random
Take a look at the below images to learn about what features unlock whenever Santa visits a certain building:
Santa Free Games
12 free games are awarded every time Santa delivers a present to one of the buildings shown above. During these free games, the Santa symbol is a substitute for all other symbols and is guaranteed to appear at least once on every spin but not on adjacent reels.
Whenever the Santa Symbol appears in a winning combination, it will expand to cover all positions on the reel before the spin pays out.
Sleigh Free Games
During this feature, 12 free games are awarded to the player. Here, Santa’s sleigh will fly around the reels delivering between 2 and 4 extra wild symbols per spin.
Sticky Re-Spins
Once again, 12 free games will be awarded. During this feature, any winning combination will award two sticky re-spins and an extra free game. Your winning combos will stick on the reels while sticky re-spins are active and will only be cleared once the re-spins have been completed.
2. Fruit Shop: Christmas Edition (Net Ent)
Fruit Shop: Christmas Edition is perfect for players who are looking for a more familiar experience with a festive twist. Sure it lacks the elaborate features of Santa’s Village but it more than makes up for this by dishing out free spins like t-shirts during election time. We’ll look at this mechanic in a bit more detail later.
The only special symbol that you’re going to want to look out for here is the “FRUIT SHOP” tile. This acts as WILD, and substitutes for all other symbols. An added bonus? Every winning combination that features this WILD symbol will include a 2x multiplier.
Free Spins
Where this game really shines, however, is in the amount of free spins it dishes out. Land two or three cherries on a single payline? Get a free spin. Land four cherries and scoop two free spins. Five cherries will bag you five free spins.
The other fruit symbols also award free spins. Landing three Lemons, Oranges, Plums or Melons on a payline will award one free spin, four will award two free spins and five will award three free spins.
3. Christmas Carol Megaways (Pragmatic)
We wrap up our trio of festive games with something a bit different in Christmas Carol Megaways from Pragmatic Play. No prizes for guessing the game draws inspiration from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Featuring a familiar cast of characters like Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the three ghosts; the game offers charm by the bucketload and plenty of ways to win!
Megaways Explained
Before we dive deeper, we need to explain the Megaways concept. Traditional games have a fixed number of symbols across their reels. When it comes to Megaways, however, the number of paylines varies from spin to spin. Featuring six reels, Megaways games see the number of symbols on each of the reels change from one spin to the next, meaning there will be different sets of paylines every game.
Tumble Feature
The game’s Tumble Feature triggers on any winning spin and causes all the winning symbols to disappear. The remaining symbols all fall to the bottom of their ‘columns’ with the empty positions replaced by new symbols that come from above. The tumbling will continue until there are no more winning combinations. It’s important to note that this feature’s mechanics apply to the Free Spins.
Free Spins
The Golden Pocket Watch acts as the SCATTER symbol. Land four of these anywhere on the reels and you’ll trigger the Free Spins Round. During the Free Spins feature, every Tumble will increase your winning multiplier by 1x. At the beginning of this round, you can choose one of four options as broken down below:
Four Scatters
- 15 free spins with a starting multiplier of 1x
- 10 free spins with a starting multiplier of 5x
- 5 free spins with a starting multiplier of 10x
- Random number of free spins with a random multiplier
Five Scatters
- 19 free spins with a starting multiplier of 1x
- 14 free spins with a starting multiplier of 5x
- 9 free spins with a starting multiplier of 10x
- Random number of free spins with a random multiplier
Six Scatters
- 23 free spins with a starting multiplier of 1x
- 18 free spins with a starting multiplier of 5x
- 13 free spins with a starting multiplier of 10x
- Random number of free spins with a random multiplier
