Book of Santa

Demo Overview

In the Book of Santa demo, the Free Games start by picking a random symbol to expand, and you play with whatever it lands on. The badge beside reel 1 changes that. A tilted red-and-gold book graphic reads BONUS POP, and through it you can buy the round and choose the expanding symbol yourself.

This 5-reel slot is Endorphina’s December 2019 Christmas release, and the reels are set inside a brick fireplace opening. Purple-blue stone bricks are lit orange-red, embers glow along the bottom ledge, and red-and-white candy-cane stripes divide the reels. Santa is a square picture tile, smiling and white-bearded in a red hat and small round gold-rimmed glasses, which puts the game among the Santa slots as firmly as among the book games. The logo puts a red Christmas bauble in the ‘o’ of ‘of’, and the sleigh is blue with gold swirls and gold runners, with no reindeer in sight.

Slot Features

The Book

The brown leather-bound book with gold corner fittings, drawn on a red square tile with white snowflake marks, does two jobs. As the scatter, it counts at any position and pays 2x, 20x, and 200x for three, four, and five, and 3 or more of them start the Free Games. As the Wild, it substitutes for Santa, the bell, the star, the sleigh, and the five card ranks on a line.

Expanding Symbol

Each round of Free Games has one special expanding symbol. It expands if enough of it are on the reels to complete a winning combination, and where they land doesn’t matter, only how many. The expansion is vertical and comes after the payout of regular symbols, and the expanded symbol then pays in adjacent and non-adjacent positions, only on enabled paylines.

The book can’t help with that count. During Free Games, the Wild cannot substitute for the special expanding symbol, so the symbol has to land in enough places by itself.

Free Games

3 or more books trigger 10 Free Games with a special expanding symbol. How the symbol is picked depends on how you got there.

The round can be won again during the feature, so books landing within it can add more Free Games.

Bonus Pop

Bonus Pop lets you select any symbol to give the capacity to expand, and it buys the Free Games at any time. The cost depends on the total bet as well as on the chosen option. A bought round opens with one main-game spin that lands 3 books, and the selection step that follows is guaranteed to give you the symbol you chose. Past that step, the bought round works the same way as one triggered by chance.

A win from a regular spin, though not from a bought round, can also go to the Risk Game, the card gamble behind Crown Coins’ odds screen; if the Dealer wins in any round, you lose your winnings and the Risk Game ends.

Take Bonus Pop away, and Book of Santa is a familiar 10-line book slot in a fireplace frame. The choice is what lifts it, because Santa pays 500x for five on a line while Q, J, and 10 pay 10x. The limit is everything around that choice. The Wild can’t help the expanding symbol, a triggered round still leaves the pick to chance, and there’s little else to explore in free play once you’ve seen the expansion work.