Sticky Bees

How to Play

Five matching symbols touching each other is the smallest result worth anything on this 7×7 board, and where they land matters as much as what they are, because the game marks squares by position and takes no notice of the symbol standing on them.

Winning symbols clear, the survivors fall, and fresh ones drop into the gaps until a spin stops producing blocks. Two blocks landing together both count towards the spin total. The game pays out once the tumbling stops, so a spin is worth the sum of everything it produced. A modest opening result often ends up the smallest part of what the spin was worth.

Against Sugar Rush

Sticky Bees shares its chassis with Sugar Rush, down to the 7×7 board, the minimum block of 5, and the random marking. They split on what an activated position carries. On that game, an active square carries a multiplier that keeps climbing as further wins land on it, so coverage compounds late in a round. Here, an active square carries a wild worth one symbol in whatever block it joins, no matter how long it has been active. That makes Sticky Bees the easier of the two slots to read and the flatter of the two to finish.

RTP

Stakes go from $0.20 to $240, with no ante bet and no super-spin mode attached, so the figure on the bet button is the whole cost of a spin. The bet menu carries both the coin value and the bet level, and the same range applies whether you buy the round or wait for it. The demo returns 96.06%, and the bought round returns 95.99%. Sticky Bees ships with a MEDIUM volatility badge, though this review files it a tier higher at High, closer to how a 7×7 grid with a 7-spin feature actually behaves.

Symbol Pays

Strawberries top the table at 125x the bet for a block of 20 or more, while the J and Q royals start at 0.25x for a block of 5. Block size drives everything in between, and the step from 15 to 19 symbols up to 20 or more is the steepest one on the board for every symbol. Cherries and the four royals fill the lower half, where a block of 5 hands back less than the stake, so a spin usually needs its tumbles to amount to anything.

Detailed Review

The marking finally has room to work in free spins. The count locks between 16 and 19 squares for the duration; every spin guarantees a small handful of Super Wilds into them, and each square activated stays wild until the round is over. Seven spins is a short window, and coverage carrying forward instead of resetting saves it. The last spin usually works a very different grid from the first.

A wild is worth one symbol, and that is the honest limit here. The multiplier version of this board raises the value of everything passing through an active square, whereas these squares only join in. Wide coverage still helps, since a wild in the right place joins two neighbouring groups into one block of 10 or 12, but the reward stops growing once a square is lit.

The paytable is modest against what the cap allows. The best single block the table offers is far short of the maximum, which arrives only if one sequence stacks several large blocks together. Pragmatic Play released this one in May 2023, and it has stayed one of the plainer boards in the studio’s cluster range, with no multiplier, no ante, and one price on the plaque.

Anyone who found the multiplier grid hard to track will get on with this board, because a lit square means a wild and nothing else. Anyone who came for the compounding will notice its absence by the third free spin. It is an easy grid to leave running in free play, and Sweet Bonanza covers the same fruit-and-tumble idea if sticky squares are not the draw.

Frequently Asked Questions