Triple Flame Slot – Free Demo

A wall of fire behind the fruit

The Flames wild and the Re-Spins it hands out are all the game has. Merkur's February 2018 release Triple Flame is a slot founded on the German arcade fruit machine. A wall of fire rests behind the reels, and the flame itself does all the work. I put 290 spins through it at 50.00 a spin.

In many respects, Triple Flame is a classic Merkur slot, with traits characteristic of the German studio. Five or ten paylines is the only structural choice you make before the reels turn. Anyone who's ever played their slots will feel perfectly at home.

The studio certainly has a talent for building fruit-themed slots - Fruitopia, Fruitinator and Fantastic Fruit just to cite a few - and Triple Flame sits right in with the set, with its vivid, neon-edged artwork that sits against the black reel windows.

This 5-reel, 3-row slot is played with 5 or 10 selectable paylines. The stake is set per line, so the total bet moves with the number of lines you switch on. It takes bets between 0.05 and 100.00. I ran my session at 50.00. Central to the slot is the Flames wild, and more crucially the Re-Spins feature it delivers, which is where much of the money in my session came from.

Fruit paid from both ends of the line

The regular symbols are fruit and a bell - cherries, lemons, oranges, grapes and watermelons, with the bell alongside them; the lines are read both left to right and right to left, so a payline can be completed from either end. A line has to land on consecutive reels from whichever end it starts. Only the highest win is paid per payline, and coinciding wins on different paylines are added together. Running ten lines instead of five doubles the number of lines that can be added together.

The game also comes with one special symbol. It is the Flames, and it does two jobs. The Flames wild substitutes for all symbols. Landing one also starts the Re-Spins, which is where the rest of its value sits. In my 290 spins, 76 paid something, and 39 of those paid less than the stake. The longest run with nothing at all lasted 17 spins and finished on spin 158.

The card, the ladder and Collect Half

Merkur has retained the gamble on the win. It is offered before the win is booked to the balance. It is available on anything from 0.05 upward, though not while autostart is active.

There are two of them, and the card gamble invites you to name the colour of the next card, red or black. A correct call doubles the winning, or awards the top win. The ladder gamble steps up on the 1:1 button, or drops you onto a lower valued step; Collect Half halves the card stake or reduces the ladder by one step and books the saved stake as winnings, while Collect cashes everything in.

Seven Flames chains across 290 spins

It's not overly difficult to trigger, though be ready for several of the re-spins to finish in quite small wins. Mine included 60.00 on spin 104 and 170.00 on spin 195, 1.2x and 3.4x the stake.

The Re-Spins feature is triggered by Flames landing on the reels. In my session they came on spins 104, 118, 171, 195, 217, 229 and 278. They expand and substitute for all symbols, and are held for a free re-spin. The gaps between those triggers ran from 12 spins to 53. Should any extra Flames appear, they too expand and substitute. All extra and earlier Flames are then held for another free re-spin. Held Flames accumulate, so a longer chain leaves more of the grid substituting. Stakes are not paid for the free re-spins; the effective bet is the bet that was in play when they were won. On spin 217 the chain paid 650.00 at my bet, 13.0x the stake.

Seven of them appeared across my 290 spins, and together they paid 3,310.00, which is 29% of everything I won. That is a little over 470.00 a trigger. The largest was 900.00 on spin 118, worth 18.0x the stake. The base game paid 60.00 on that same spin, taking the total to 960.00, or 19.2x.

The Minty Take: Seven Flames chains returned 3,310.00 of the 11,365.00 that came back over 290 spins, so 29% of my winnings arrived on seven spins, and the fruit lines in between never once lifted the balance past the 5,000.00 it opened on.

Closing at 1,865.00

So this is not an inventive slot, nor was it intended to be - it's just as much a classic online slot as the fruit machine it is derived from. The last two triggers, on spins 229 and 278, paid 250.00 and 430.00, 5.0x and 8.6x the stake. What you get here is classic Merkur, with a feature that carries the game.

Over 290 spins at 50.00 I wagered 14,500.00 and won 11,365.00, a return of 78.4%. That left 1,865.00 of the 5,000.00 I started with. The balance never once climbed above the 5,000.00 I began with. The best single spins were 1,700.00 on spin 222 and 1,500.00 on spin 179, both base-game wins at 34.0x and 30.0x the stake. It bottomed out at 345.00, before the re-spin on spin 171 hauled it back to 1,145.00.