No wild appears on these reels until the free spins begin. That’s the rule in Big Bass Halloween, and it reshapes every spin before the bonus, because the fish landing with $10 and $25 stamped on them can’t be collected by anything. Pragmatic Play built this slot around a symbol it keeps offstage.
Three, four or five scatters open the round at 10, 15 or 20 spins, and the reel set swaps the moment it starts. Now the fisherman turns up. Every one that lands sweeps every cash value on screen at once, and he keeps sweeping until the spins run out. Money fish carry 2x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x or 2,000x the total bet, and that top fish is the only realistic route to the 2,100x cap.
Collect four wilds and the round retriggers with ten more spins and a 2x multiplier on everything the fisherman picks up afterwards. Four more takes it to 3x. Four more takes it to 10x, and that’s it. A third retrigger is the last one the game permits, so the climb has a hard stop rather than an open run.
The rules are unusually blunt about the 2,100x limit. Reach it mid-round, and the round stops there; the win is paid up to the cap, and every feature still queued behind it is forfeited. With a 2,000x fish in the value pool and a 10x collection multiplier available, that outcome is live rather than theoretical.
Switch on the extra-scatter option, and the stake rises by half, shown live on the button as $3.00 against a $2.00 bet. More scatters sit on the reels while it runs. It also greys out Buy Free Spins, which otherwise asks 100x the stake, so the two shortcuts to the bonus can’t be used together.
Reel Kingdom assembled this on the same collect engine as Big Bass Bonanza, and the October 2023 release sits inside a Big Bass series that had already pushed past the figures it carries.
The Ante Bet button shows $3.00, while the bet underneath sits at $2.00, and that 50% surcharge is the only on-screen control that changes how often the bonus arrives. Stakes start at $0.10. Ten paylines are fixed across five reels and three rows, so you can’t adjust the line count.
Money Fish takes a fresh value on every spin, whether or not a scatter is near, which is what makes the wait feel long. Buy Free Spins asks 100x the stake, $200.00 at that same $2.00 bet, and it vanishes the moment the Ante Bet goes on.
Values below are based on the $2.00 stake the demo opened on, shown as bet multiples.
| Symbol | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lifebuoy (Reel Kingdom) | 200x | 20x | 5x | 0.5x |
| Hook | 100x | 15x | 3x | – |
| Crow | 50x | 10x | 2x | – |
| Tackle Box | 50x | 10x | 2x | – |
| Shoal of Fish | 20x | 5x | 1x | – |
| A / K / Q / J / 10 | 10x | 2.5x | 0.5x | – |
The lowest return and the smallest cap in the Big Bass line, both held over from 2020 and shipped in a Halloween costume three years later. The collect round still reads well, but nothing underneath the seasonal art was rebuilt for it.
Start with the return. 96.06% appears three times on one rules page, once for standard play, once with the Ante Bet running and once for a bought round, so the number never moves whatever you pay. A 96.04% figure circulates elsewhere for this game. This review is based on the screen version, and either way it is the softest RTP the franchise has attached to a Halloween lake.
And until the free spins arrive, there is no wild anywhere on the reels.
That absence is the design, and it leaves the money fish decorative for long stretches. Values from 2x to 2,000x land, glow and go — nothing on those reels can lift them. When the round finally opens, the collect works well enough, and the 2x, 3x and 10x steps give the retriggers something to build towards. Then the 2,100x limit does what most caps don’t, ending the round on contact and forfeiting whatever was still queued behind it.
Its own sequels settle the argument. Halloween 2 put the return back to 96.71% in 2024, and Halloween 3 lifted the cap to 5,000x in 2025, which is a studio correcting two figures it had every chance to get right in 2023. Anyone unconvinced can test it for nothing. Run twenty minutes of free play, watch the values stack on fish that nothing can reach, then set this against Big Bass Christmas Frozen Lake and judge how much a seasonal skin is really allowed to change.
