Fa Cai Shen Deluxe Slot – Free Demo

A temple of fortune on six reels

Habanero is going all in on the Chinese prosperity theme. I put 300 spins through it at a stake of 2.80. Gods of fortune, gold ingots and dragons are performing the heavy lifting here, and it's not a theme I'm personally huge fans of. But if the playability is solid, the maths accurate and there's good money to be won, who cares? That run started from a balance of 1,000.00 and ended at 1,309.96. As a matter of fact, all of the things noted are elements that have helped propel Habanero from a sort of total obscurity to a more central spot on the market. The 300 spins cost 840.00 and returned 1,149.96. Players are now becoming increasingly conscious of its games. That is a session return of 136.9%.

Habanero has not managed to win me over, despite this. Fa Cai Shen Deluxe produced one Free Games trigger across those 300 spins. In my view, there's still a sort of generic vibe to the games that the firm seem to be unable to shake, and the bonuses are for the most part unreasonably difficult to trigger. Only 78 spins paid anything at all, 26% of them, and 39 of those paid back less than the stake. What I believe, however, doesn't always count of course. The longest run without a win was 12 spins, ending on spin 77. Players tend to have a wide outlook in general - you'd be stunned to hear about some of the games many players keep pounding away at on a daily basis. The balance bottomed out at 636.28 along the way.

Fa Cai Shen Deluxe is the name of this Habanero video slot. It descends from Fa Cai Shen, the 2016 original, which runs on 5 reels and 28 paylines and pays on those lines rather than on the grid used here. It is located in a Chinese temple of fortune and played on a 6-reel reel set, where wins are created by horizontal and vertical lines of the same symbol rather than by paylines. A single row or column can hold more than one win, and wins from different combinations are added together. It's not exactly abundant in base game features - there's the expanding wild and that's it. One, two or three wilds can land on a base game spin. It's the bonus that packs most of the punch. In this session it accounted for 67% of everything won.

Fa Cai Shen Deluxe comes delivered with an RTP setting of 96.75%, and there's no need to dig into that as it's well within the acceptable range. Habanero's Mystic Fortune Deluxe, from 2021, is another 28-coin game, and its RTP is 96.71%. Every spin is played for 28 coins, with the coin value doing the job of fixing your bet. Wins are multiplied by the bet level, so the coin you pick scales the whole paytable with it.

Visually, it's a respectable looking game. But that generic vibe that I noted earlier is still there. There are more studios than Habanero suffering from this problem, to be fair, and it's not actually a deal-breaker since the games are of fairly high quality.

The dragon, the ingot and the god of riches

The low-value symbols are the customary card royals, and moving up to the more valuable symbols we spot the dragon on the reels. Below it sit the coins, the fish, the money tree, the knot and the jade ring. It's the most profitable one, granting you 14,440 coins for six of a kind. Six of a kind means a full horizontal line of dragons running across all six reels. The gold ingot is the scatter. Three of them anywhere is also the smallest scatter pay. It pays anywhere on the screen and contributes to your line wins, with six of them worth 12,320 coins. Scatter wins are worked out against the total bet rather than a line stake.

It's Fa Cai Shen himself that represents the wild symbol, god of riches and centre of attention here, and it expands to blanket 3 positions on its reel. The expansion happens before any wins are awarded. It substitutes for everything except the scatter. That means the gold ingot always has to arrive on its own merits. It never appears on two neighbouring reels.

28 free games on spin 220

To obtain access to the Free Games mode, you will have to land 3 scatters anywhere on the reels. My one trigger arrived on spin 220, with the balance sitting at its lowest point of 636.28. That grants 8 free games. 4, 5 or 6 scatters bump that to 18, 28 or 88, and players will profit from additional wild symbols as the wild lands twice on every spin. Those two keep off adjacent reels as well, and each still expands over 3 positions. On top of that, before any random free game, between 3 and 24 symbols transform into the same random high symbol, and the whole thing is played at the triggering bet. The symbol drawn is the dragon, the coins, the fish, the money tree, the knot or the jade ring. Now, the scatter is missing during the bonus, so there is no retriggering it.

The mixture of the doubled wilds and the transformed symbols makes for quite a thrilling bonus, as you've likely already worked out. That one spin took the balance to 1,406.28, the highest it reached all session. The one bonus I witnessed was 28 free games on spin 220. That is the award for five scatters. It returned 772.80 from a 2.80 stake - 276 times the bet, and two thirds of everything the session won. The next best spin of the 300 paid 36.40, or 13 times the stake.

Minty’s Expert Conclusion: One Free Games round supplied 67% of everything my 300 spins won, at 276 times the stake. The base game underneath it is one expanding wild and nothing else.

Generic, but not poor

Fa Cai Shen Deluxe makes no effort to come across as anything other than the plain, rather unremarkable, slot that it is, and it's not poor mind you. Take spin 220 out and the other 299 spins returned 377.16 against 840.00 wagered. With that said, there's that generic vibe to it. Its dull prosperity theme that I've seen too many times before makes that worse.

This is not Habanero's proudest showing. Only one spin in my 300 paid more than 20 times the stake. Maybe it was never intended to be, and it might provide some amusement to you if you're prepared to look beyond the absence of features and originality.