Heidi's Bier Haus Slot – Free Demo

The colour only matters once the round starts

Five scattered Heidis on adjacent reels start the free spins, and the game counts them without caring what colour they were — five symbols buy five spins, six buy ten, and the ladder climbs in fives to seventy-five before it jumps to a hundred. The colour matters afterwards. Purple, green and red each hand the round a different piece of equipment, and two of the three are worth more than the spin they added.

Red Heidi lives on one reel and one reel only

Purple Heidi, if she helped trigger the round, is replaced by a persisting wild that locks into her position and stays there for every free spin that follows. Green Heidi does nothing beyond her place in the count. Red Heidi awards a spin of Heidi's Wheel before the free spins begin — and the rules screen puts her on reel four, nowhere else.

That single line is the whole economy of the game. The wheel carries four jackpot meters, and at the 0.75 configuration I played they read 4,000, 750, 75 and 9 credits. The top one is 5,333 times the stake, the same figure the details table above quotes as the maximum this machine pays. On those two numbers the game's ceiling and its top wheel slice are the same prize, the wheel is gated behind one symbol, and that symbol is available on one reel in six.

The pointer cannot stop on a jackpot

Heidi's Wheel has six kinds of slice and they do not resolve the same way. Land on Heidi, Hans, the accordion or the pretzel and the corresponding meter pays out — plus another spin of the wheel. Land on the beer and you get three Wild Hans spins. Land on extra spins and you get five, seven or ten more free games.

Read that as a loop rather than a table and the shape appears: the four money slices all re-arm the wheel, so the only outcomes that end it are the beer and the extra spins. A player who keeps hitting meters keeps spinning. The wheel stops when it hands you something that is not cash.

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Neither of my wheels touched a meter

I spun 130 times at 0.75 and the bonus came in on spins 14, 60, 71 and 84. The first was five free spins and closed at 6.70 credits. The other three were ten spins each, and red Heidi was in two of those triggers, so the wheel came out twice — once landing on extra spins for five more games, once on the beer for three Wild Hans spins. The rounds finished at 24.50, 32.35 and 4.45 credits.

Sixty-eight credits across four rounds, from a start of 1,000, with the last frame I captured reading 1,026.50. Both wheels ended the way the rules say a wheel has to end — one on the beer, one on extra spins — and the meters overhead never moved.

The two wilds refuse to share a square

Inside the round the two wild features work on opposite principles. A persisting wild from purple Heidi sits in one square for the duration. A Wild Hans spin drops between four and ten Hans wilds across the grid at random — but never onto a square a persisting wild already holds. The locked positions subtract from the surface the flood can cover, which means a round rich in purple is a round where Hans has less room to work.

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There is a third wild source running underneath both. The Tapper turns anywhere from one to six reels entirely wild, at random, in the base game and in free spins alike. And before every spin the game quietly swaps a number of positions on reels one to five for other symbols. In the base game that swap can produce anything except a club or a red Heidi; in free spins it also refuses hearts, diamonds and spades. The replacement pool in the bonus has had every low card stripped out of it.

Minty’s Closing Thought: The free spins are generous with wilds and stingy with everything else — four rounds in my session produced sixty-eight credits between them. What the round is really selling is the chance that red Heidi was in the trigger, because that is the only door to the 4,000 meter.

A floor nobody mentions online

One screen in the cabinet menu does not appear in the help page the game links out to: any feature ending below 2.50 is topped up to 2.50 at the end of it. At the stake I played that is a shade over three times the bet, which is a floor low enough that my 4.45 round cleared it without help. It is still the only guaranteed number in the feature.

The paylines screen prints the return at 96.13% and the copyright at 2017 Scientific Games, which is the cabinet's age showing through a client stamped 1.0.118. Light & Wonder has carried the same habits into its other ports — the meters in Huff N' More Puff are quoted in cash for the same reason — and it has kept the trick of letting the trigger decide the size of the prize, which is what Dancing Drums Prosperity does with its five doors.

The ladder that sets the round length runs in fives up to nineteen symbols, then jumps to a flat hundred spins for twenty and above. Most players will only ever meet it at five.