Two buttons sit beside the Club Tropicana Happy Hour slot reels. One asks 100x your stake for the free spins, the other 350x for the Super version, the latter buys all 5 modifiers rather than the 0 to 5 the game otherwise draws at random. Through ordinary play, the bartender is scenery. The left-hand edge of the game is his, and he shakes his mixer over the wins. In the free spins, he is on the reels instead as the wild, and it banks the value from every cocktail on screen. Every fourth bartender collected adds 10 more free spins and steps the collection multiplier up a level. Not one of the 5 modifiers promises you a bartender in the first place.
The cocktail does two jobs. It pays as a symbol, and it carries a money value. Every spin gives each one a figure. The bottom of the range is 2x, 5x and 10x, the middle runs 15x, 20x, 25x and 50x, and above that sit 100x, 200x, 500x, 1666x, 2500x and 5000x the bet. You can read them before a single scatter lands, each one set on a plate below its glass. Five cocktails on one line pay the total of what they show.
Hit 3 scatters and 10 free spins follow. A 4-scatter trigger gives 15, and a 5-scatter one gives 20. Land 2 without a third, and the game might give you a second go at it. The reels holding scatters can drop one position without leaving the reel area while the reels around them respin, or a beer can appear and pull one reel upwards to uncover another scatter.
Three scatters for 10 free spins, with $5 and $10 cocktails already sitting on the reels at our $1 bet.
Inside the bonus round, the bartender is the wild. He fills in for the paying symbols, never for a scatter, and special reels are in play throughout. As he lands, he collects the value of each cocktail on the reels, and the sum appears on his own picture.
Each bartender that hits is held until the round finishes, and every 4th one collected earns 10 more free spins. Those spins run after the current batch, and the collection multiplier steps up when they begin. Level 2 pays 2x on what he collects, 3 pays 3x and 4 pays 10x, so a round opening on 10 can reach 40.
Before a round begins, a card headed BARTENDER MAKES lights up whichever of the following the game has drawn.
Three further things can happen once a free spin settles, and which of them is available depends on what the reels are short of. Bartenders with no cocktails anywhere get one of two: the exotic drinks spin, which brings cocktails into random positions, or a shaker animation, which sweeps every symbol but the bartenders away and leaves something else behind. Cocktails with no bartender get a beer, pushed up beneath a reel to lift bartenders into view. None of the 3 needs a modifier to happen, and none of them fires on an ordinary spin.
The bonus buy costs 100x the bet and awards 0-5 modifiers, and Super Free Spins asks for 350x but arrives with every modifier already in play. Both purchases drop 3, 4 or 5 scatters onto the triggering spin, though the game picks how many.
This toggle offers an alternative to buying in directly. It adds 50% to your stake on every spin, and in return, the reels carry more scatters, so the feature triggers more often.
All 12 paylines are fixed, and they read left to right along adjacent reels. Each line is worked out on its own, and only the best result on it counts. Lines that pay at the same time add together. Five shakers on a line make $200.00 at a $1.00 spin, and two of them pay $0.50, the only 2-symbol win in the game.
Stakes run from $0.10 to $375.00 in even steps, the same in free play as for real money. The return sits at 96.50% whether you spin normally, switch the Ante on or pay for a round outright. It is volatile, and the cap is 5,000x the bet. A round that reaches it stops on the spot, and any free spins left go unplayed.
| Symbol | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shaker | $200.00 | $20.00 | $5.00 | $0.50 |
| Drinks umbrella | $100.00 | $15.00 | $3.00 | |
| Coconut cup | $50.00 | $10.00 | $2.00 | |
| Hibiscus | $50.00 | $10.00 | $2.00 | |
| Cocktail | Total money value | $5.00 | $1.00 | |
| Watermelon | $10.00 | $2.50 | $0.20 | |
| Grapes | $10.00 | $2.50 | $0.20 | |
| Orange | $5.00 | $1.00 | $0.20 | |
| Lemon | $5.00 | $1.00 | $0.20 | |
| Cherries | $5.00 | $1.00 | $0.20 |
Values shown at the $1.00 stake played during this review.
Everything in Club Tropicana Happy Hour is pointed at one round. A cocktail can carry any of 13 money values, 5 modifiers are settled before a reel turns, 3 events can fire inside the feature, and 4 levels of collecting sit on top of it. For a game built that heavily it is remarkably plain to play, and it praises you identically at every size, EPIC WIN over a $63.00 collect and again over a $440.00 one at the same $1.00 spin. The road to the last level is 12 collected bartenders, and 4 of the 5 modifiers shorten it, one by skipping a level outright, another by adding 2 spins to every batch. Ours came with the lot lit, ran 12 spins and paid $94.00 on a 350x buy, which is what a fully equipped round can still come to.
The base game teaches the round before the free spins start. Every cocktail carries its figure from the first spin, and 5 of them on a line pays whatever they add up to. That landed once for us, line 7 for $19.00 on a $1.00 spin. A session of reading those figures is what makes the first bartender land as a number rather than a symbol.
What a bartender brings back depends on the level he lands at. At 2x, $37.00 of cocktails in view came back as $74.00. A level higher, $21.00 came back as $63.00. Then at 10x, a grid carrying $44.00 paid $440.00, and it did it twice in one run of spins. One symbol reads the board and multiplies what it finds, so the same handful of glasses is worth 10x more in the last batch than the first. Our best round went the distance, 48 spins across all 4 levels, and finished on $1,505.10 from a $100.00 buy.
The plainest of the 5 modifiers turned out to be the one worth having. +2 Spins does not sound like much next to Start From Level 2 or More Bartenders. It adds 2 spins to a round’s opening batch and 2 to every retrigger, so a round that would have run 10, 10, 10 and 10 runs 12 in each. That is 8 spins of difference, and 4 of them sit at 3x and 10x.
The 2023 Club Tropicana ran the same round on a much emptier money symbol. Its values stopped at 50x and jumped straight to 4,000x with nothing in between, so a round was quiet or it was over. This one fills the gap with 100x, 200x, 500x, 1666x and 2500x, and lifts the return from 96.08% to 96.50%. The look has moved as well, off a night beach in blue and purple and onto a sunset that turns the water orange, with the logo and the Happy Hour script bouncing in place whenever a win lands. Anyone who knows the older game will recognise every rule in this one, and the difference they will feel sits in the middle of a round more than at the ends.
