In Big Time Gaming’s telling, the Bonanza mine still produces gold, and one of its richest miners has taken a mule down to Mexico, where he makes jewellery from his own gems and wants a chilli called the Purple Conquistador. Extra Chilli Megaways keeps Bonanza’s reels, its reactions and every figure on its paytable. Two decisions are new. One is whether to gamble the 8 free spins you start with. The other is whether to buy your way in or wait for the scatters.
Win anything and the woodwork does the talking. An orange glow lights up each winning symbol, the tile sinks into the frame, and it bursts with a snap and a shower of splinters. Fresh symbols fall into the holes from above on the 6 main reels. On the extra reel underneath, they feed in from the right instead. Both directions run on one system. Any win the new arrivals make sets it all off once more, and during a bonus round each reaction also takes the win multiplier up 1.
H, O and T are what you need, and they don’t have to be neighbours. Three of them anywhere on the grid open the free spins with 8, and every scatter beyond the third brings 4 more. Wilds stand in for everything except the scatters and the Feature Drop coins, and they come dressed as a bundle of lit firecrackers.
Once a bonus round is underway, a second scatter joins in, a squat pot crammed with red chillies that shows up on the extra reel. Hit 3 pots and the round gains 4 spins, whilst 4 pots will add 8 spins.
No round begins until the wheel has had its say. It rolls up the instant a trigger lands, headed ADD EXTRA CHILLI, and the question is a plain one. Collect, and the free spins start on the count you were handed. Gamble, and a win takes you up 4 spins and offers the choice again, as far as a top of 24.
A loss pays whatever sits in the black window beside it, and for the opening 2 gambles that is a bare 0. From the third it reads 8, then 12, so a round can no longer be wiped out. Each step up carries its own colour, and ours ran green for 12, blue for 16 and red for 20.
Feature Drop is the button beneath the reels, and at our $1.00 stake, it wanted $50.00 per round. That figure moves. Feature Drop coins land among the symbols and knock their own amount off the total, anything from 0.2 up to 2x the stake, and get it to zero, and the round opens by itself.
Those coins don’t turn up on the extra reel, and they stop appearing altogether once free spins are running, so the discount builds only while you’re paying for the spins. The purchase price falls while you play, so the number on the button is worth watching. Neither it nor the gamble feature exists in Bonanza.
The percentages here reward the buy. Regular play returns 96.15% to 96.41%, depending on the build an operator runs, and the Feature Drop route pushes it up again, to a top of 96.82%. Buying the round gives back more than waiting for one does, which is the reverse of how most bonus buys work.
Volatility is rated high whichever route you take, and while the win multiplier itself has no cap, the most the game pays out is 20,000x the stake. A spin runs from $0.20 to $40.00, and all of it can be tried in free play.
Every reel can show up to 7 symbols, and on reels 2 to 5 the seventh is the one the extra reel supplies. With a full 7 symbols on all 6 reels you get the 117,649 Megaways. A win has to begin on reel 1 and run rightwards across touching reels, whatever size the symbols happen to be. The Megaways number counts how many separate ways a win could pay, and you get there by multiplying the matching symbols on each reel of the run.
| Symbol | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purple chilli | 50x | 25x | 10x | 5x | 2x |
| Red chilli | 7.5x | 2.5x | 2x | 1x | |
| Blue chilli | 2x | 1.5x | 1x | 0.25x | |
| Green chilli | 2x | 0.75x | 0.5x | 0.25x | |
| A / K | 1.75x | 0.6x | 0.4x | 0.2x | |
| Q | 1x | 0.6x | 0.25x | 0.2x | |
| J | 1x | 0.5x | 0.25x | 0.15x | |
| 10 | 0.9x | 0.5x | 0.25x | 0.15x | |
| 9 | 0.8x | 0.4x | 0.2x | 0.1x |
At the $1.00 we spun, these double as dollars. Purple is the only chilli that pays for a pair.
Both of Big Time Gaming's additions look like garnish until you notice what the multiplier does. Every reaction adds 1, and it holds until the free spins end, so how long a round runs is what the gamble wheel changes, and the Feature Drop sets the price of entry. Bonanza has sat at 4/5 on this site since we reviewed it, and Extra Chilli just edges past it for handing the player a say in how far that multiplier runs. The cost is that nothing is settled at the trigger. A round can be 8 spins or 24 or anything between on the wheel's steps, or none at all.
The wheel is a real decision and not a formality, and the game is straight with you about what taking it costs. Presentation is another draw. Every win is an event here, the reaction chains keep a spin alive well past the moment it should have ended, and the multiplier stacked up over them has no upper limit at all. The reels can pay well on their own too. Five purple chillies across 2 ways returned $50.00 at our $1.00 stake, which is what the Feature Drop was asking for a round in the same frame.
Bonanza’s engine arrives here untouched, so anyone coming from that game is paying for 2 decisions and not a fresh one. Nothing on the reels is new either. Purple still tops out at 50x for 6, the royals still start at 0.1x, and a Bonanza player will recognise every value on the table.
Extra Chilli drops you into a Mexican market and then fills it. Ropes of garlic and dried chillies hang each side of the wooden stall the reels are built into, with jars of salsa lined up along the pale blue paint below. A whitewashed bell tower rises behind the bunting, and a produce cart with a yellow wheel waits at the left. It looks good, but it does cost the game something. The backdrop carries so much colour, and so little tonal separation from the grid, that the reels take a beat to find. Night mode, darkened and lit for the free spins, reads better, and the reactions are clearer against it.
Sound has its own near miss. Chatter and birdsong sit under the idle, a burst of music arrives with each spin and runs for about 5 seconds, and with no autoplay here, keeping the tune alive means pressing for yourself.
Underneath the dressing, one row has moved. Bonanza ran it in carts above the reels, and Extra Chilli hangs it on a shelf below. Both feed reels 2 to 5 with one symbol each, for the same 117,649 ways. Feature Drop coins are barred from the extra reel, so the row that adds a symbol to 4 of the 6 reels never takes anything off the price of a buy.
Getting in is easier than before. Bonanza asks for all 4 letters of GOLD and gives 12 free spins. This wants 3 of H, O and T and starts you on 8. Or you can skip the wait and buy the round outright. Our natural trigger came up early, and the wheel arrived before any of the 8 could be played. We gambled, lost the lot, and the round was over without a single spin.
That wheel settles how many spins you get, and it matters more here than it looks. A round’s back end pays far better than its front, because the multiplier is still going up when it gets there. Our 16-spin round had banked $21.40 after 12 spins. The 2 that followed ran at x8 and x11 and added $87.90 together. An 8-spin round stops 5 spins earlier than that.
What the Feature Drop buys is the wait. Buying puts you on the 8 spins a natural trigger would have handed over, at that very wheel, so the price covers admission and nothing beyond it. Both rounds we bought cleared their cost, and the smaller of the 2 is the more instructive. It reached 12 spins because a gamble came in, closed at $68.85, and stood at $43.65 at the end of spin 8. The 4 gambled spins were the difference between clearing $50.00 and not.
