Bigger Bass Bonanza (Pragmatic Play) Slot Demo & Review

With so many games now in the Big Bass Bonanza catalogue, it starts to get confusing as to what order they were released in, especially if you’re new to the franchise. Just as a bit of a recap, though, on some of the better titles to play in the series, we’d recommend Big Bass Bonanza Megaways and Big Bass Splash to get you started, but if you want to experience everything the fishing niche has to offer, head over to our dedicated fishing themed slots page, where you can try and work why these games are so popular, as it certainly has me baffled at times.

The theme of these games might be something of a mystery to me, but I do know a good paytable when I see one! The highest-paying symbol in Bigger Bass Bonanza is the Fishing Boat, which will pay you 200x the total bet for a complete payline of five of a kind. The Fishing Rod has a return of 100x for all five symbols, whilst the Hook will add 50x the total stake to your balance whenever a complete payline forms on the reels. The Tackle Box shares the same 50x payout, whilst hitting a full payline of the Fish or Money Symbols will award the sum of the five values printed on those specific symbols. Finally, all five low-paying royals share the same return of 10x the total bet for a five of a kind combination.

Pragmatic Play has opted for a minimum bet of a penny per line here, which makes perfect sense; however, it does result in an unusual wager of €0.12 due to the odd number of paylines. You can bet almost any multiple of this amount you wish until you reach the maximum bet of €240.00 per spin.

Bigger Bass Bonanza uses a slightly larger reel set than its predecessor, with five reels, each containing four rows. The title screen announces that this increases your odds of hitting a bonus round, which I assume must be true. The highest-paying fishing boat symbol will award a win when just two matching symbols appear on a pay line starting from the left, whilst all other symbols require at least three matches before a prize is awarded.

Fish (Money) Symbols

The fish or money symbol appears on all five reels. On every spin, each fish will take a random money value. The possible values for these symbols are not listed on the paytable, although the title screen does mention that some fish can be worth as much as 4,000x the total bet!

During the base game, the only way to collect the value of these symbols is to score a full payline of five of a kind, in which case the five values will be summed and awarded as a single prize. During the bonus round, the fisherman wild symbol can collect these prizes anytime.

Hitting three or more scatter symbols will trigger the free spins feature. The minimum three-scatter trigger awards ten free spins, whilst four or five scatters award 15 or 20 free spins, respectively.

Free Spins

In this mode, a new wild symbol is added to all reels. Whenever one of these wild symbols appears, it will collect the values of all fish/money symbols currently visible on the screen. In addition, wild symbols are also collected in the meter at the top of the reel set for the duration of the bonus round.

For every fourth wild symbol collected in the meter, the game will award ten additional free spins and increase the current round multiplier. For example, after four wilds are collected, the multiplier is increased to 2x; the next time, the multiplier will increase to 3x, whilst on the third and final re-trigger, the multiplier reaches a maximum of 10x.

If a free spin concludes with a wild symbol landing on the reels, but there are no fish symbols currently visible, there is a random chance that the game will add several fish to the reels.