Five fish on the reels are worth 55x combined, and you don’t need to collect them. The fisherman who does the collecting in Christmas Big Bass Bonanza is a Santa wild that only exists inside free spins, so on a standard spin a fish pays its line value, and the number on its belly pays nothing.
Reel Kingdom took the Big Bass engine, dropped it under the ice, tied bows on the tackle boxes and left the maths alone. Until the bonus lands, the fish are decoration, and the shell under the frost is 10 paylines, a 96.71% RTP and a 2,100x cap.
A 50x fish on reel 5 beside a row of tens pays the tens and nothing for the 50x. Every fish symbol carries a cash value that changes on every spin. The values run 2x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x or 2,000x your total bet, and outside the bonus they do nothing beyond their line pays. The only way to bank a fish value is to have a Santa wild on screen with it during free spins. Between features, the fish is an ordinary symbol: 1x for 3 and 20x for 5, and the number on its belly promises what the bonus might do.
Land 3, 4 or 5 scatters and you get 10, 15 or 20 free spins, and the Santa Wild joins the reels. Each wild collects every fish value on screen and adds it to the round. The game also keeps count. Every 4th wild you collect retriggers the round, adds 10 spins and moves the collection multiplier up a step: 2x after the first retrigger, 3x after the second, 10x after the third, and the third retrigger is the last. That’s 12 wilds for the 10x step, in a round that starts at 10 to 20 spins. It happens, but you’ll play plenty of rounds where the counter stalls on 2 or 3 wilds and the retrigger never comes. The retriggered spins queue behind the ones you already have, so a busy round can run 40 spins or more.
One small rule matters more than it looks. When a free spin ends with exactly 1 wild on screen, the game can drop extra fish into random positions before that wild collects. Those are the spins where a lone Santa suddenly pulls 100x out of nowhere.
The round ends the moment its total reaches 2,100x your bet, whatever spins are left, and that cap sits oddly close to the biggest fish on the paytable. A single 2,000x fish collected at 1x already puts the round within 100x of the limit; collect it under the 2x step, and the game pays 2,100x and stops. A standard Pragmatic Play line slot usually caps at 5,000x, so 2,100x is modest for the studio, and the design follows. The game is built on frequent mid-size collections, with the top fish as a rare prize that can’t compound.
At 100x your total bet, $200 at the $2.00 demo stake, Buy Free Spins triggers the round straight away with whatever scatter count the reels land. The RTP doesn’t move when you buy; both routes run at 96.71%. That’s rarer than it sounds, because plenty of buy features shade the return down a fraction, and it makes the buy a fair way to see the collection ladder in free play without waiting on the scatters.
The mistake new players make here is counting the fish. A base-game screen with 3 fish showing 20x, 15x and 5x looks like 40x waiting to be paid, and it pays 1x if those 3 fish happen to sit on one of the 10 fixed paylines, nothing more. The Santa wild that collects those values only exists in free spins, so a standard spin has no collector and no substitute; the fish, the rods and the royals either line up or they don’t. A line pays when its symbols start on reel 1 and run unbroken to the right, one win per line, with wins on different lines added together. The symbol worth counting is the Santa-hat bass, the scatter, because 3 of them is the only route to the round.
No ante bet here, so the only price toggle is Buy Free Spins at 100x. Stakes run from $0.10 to $250 a spin, a wider top end than the $240 most Pragmatic Play slots stop at. The RTP is 96.71% whether you spin for the scatters or buy the round. Reel Kingdom built it for Pragmatic Play in December 2021. Volatility sits at Medium, and the review tab explains why.
A 2,000x fish is worth 10 times the 200x bauble line, the best pay on the table, and a 50x fish outstrips every 5-of-a-kind except the bauble and the rod. The figures below are multiples of your total bet, with the cash column at the $2.00 stake. The bauble is the only symbol that pays for a pair, 0.5x for 2 baubles on reels 1 and 2. The fish pays 20x for 5 as a line win, separate from the money value that only free spins can cash, and the scatter has no line value; it just triggers.
| Symbol | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 at $2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bauble | 0.5x | 5x | 20x | 200x | $400 |
| Fishing rod | – | 3x | 15x | 100x | $200 |
| Sleigh | – | 2x | 10x | 50x | $100 |
| Tackle box | – | 2x | 10x | 50x | $100 |
| Fish | – | 1x | 5x | 20x | $40 |
| A, K, Q, J, 10 | – | 0.5x | 2.5x | 10x | $20 |
One Santa beside one 2x fish collects 2x. A Santa on a screen holding a 50x, a 25x and a 20x collects 95x in one go, and at the 3x step that same screen pays 285x. A round is the running total of those collections, so its size comes down to what’s on screen each time a wild lands and how many wilds turn up before the spins run out. Wild count matters because the 4th, 8th and 12th each add 10 spins and lift the multiplier, so the round can keep feeding itself.
Over it all sits the 2,100x cap, which turns off the lights no matter how many spins remain. Put together, a typical round pays a handful of 5x to 50x collections at 1x, a good one reaches the 2x or 3x step, and a rare one either finds the 2,000x fish or runs 40 spins under 10x.
| Round fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Trigger | 3, 4 or 5 scatters for 10, 15 or 20 free spins |
| Retrigger | Every 4th wild collected adds 10 spins |
| Multiplier steps | 2x, 3x, 10x after retriggers 1, 2 and 3 (no 4th) |
| Fish values | 2x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, 2,000x |
| Extra fish | Random fish can appear when a spin ends with 1 wild |
| Cap | 2,100x total bet, round ends on reaching it |
| Buy | 100x total bet, RTP 96.71% either way |
Because the buy doesn’t cost you any return, the demo lets you run rounds back-to-back and count how often the 4th wild arrives before the spins run out. The Medium label comes from that count.
A faithful winter reskin of the Big Bass engine with a 96.71% RTP that survives the bonus buy, a 2,100x cap that keeps it honest, and a collection ladder that rewards patience over luck. Medium volatility is the right label. Play it for the fair buy and the fish, not for the ceiling.
The rules call it Medium volatility, and the label holds up, even though the Big Bass name carries a High reputation from the original and from Splash. The reasons are in the numbers. The cap is 2,100x rather than 5,000x or 10,000x; the RTP is 96.71% with no drop on the buy; and the collection ladder needs 12 wilds to reach its 10x step, so the round’s typical outcome is a string of 5x to 50x collections at 1x or 2x rather than one enormous multiplied catch. You get more bonuses that pay something and fewer that pay nothing, and the one that finds the 2,000x fish stops at the cap. That’s a Medium profile wearing a High-volatility franchise’s jacket.
The retrigger design is where the demo earns a second look. Because every 4th wild adds 10 spins, a round with 4 wilds in its first dozen spins snowballs, and the queued spins play out at 2x with the counter still climbing. Miss the 4th wild and the round ends on schedule. Buying the round to see that play out costs nothing in RTP, since 96.71% holds either way.
Reel Kingdom’s reskin work is thorough. The tackle boxes wear bows, the rods have candy-cane stripes, the royals are frosted, and a seahorse floats past a decorated tree on the left of the frame. Same 5×3 shell as the summer original, with a winter palette on top.
The case against it is the feature count: 1. The reels collect fish, and nothing else, and the 2,100x cap gives the collecting a hard stop. Weigh that against a 96.71% RTP that survives the buy, and the balance comes out in its favour.
Against its siblings, it sits exactly where the label says. Big Bass Bonanza is the same engine in summer colours, so the Christmas version is a skin choice; Big Bass Splash has the bigger ladder and the wilder swings people expect from the name; and the Megaways version drops the fixed lines for a shifting reel count. Pick this one for the fair buy and the frost; the rest of the Big Bass series has the swings.
| Game | RTP | Max win | Volatility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christmas Big Bass Bonanza | 96.71% | 2,100x | Medium |
| Big Bass Splash | 96.71% | 5,000x | Very High |
| Big Bass Bonanza | 96.71% | 2,100x | High |
| Big Bass Bonanza 1000 | 96.51% | 20,000x | High |
| Big Bass Splash 1000 | 96.52% | 25,000x | High |
| Big Bass Amazon Xtreme | 96.07% | 10,000x | High |
