Play Jingle Spin demo
Five dwarves and a bauble wheel
The Jingle Spin slot trundled onto the reels for NetEnt. This review draws on a 440-spin session played at a stake of 1.00 from a starting balance of 1,000.00.
Jingle Spin is set at Christmas. Christmas Carol Megaways and Santa's Big Bash Megaways are other Christmas-themed slots. It is heavy on the bauble theme, and five dwarves, for instance, perch above the 5-reel, 20-payline game zone. All 20 paylines are fixed, and wins pay left to right from the leftmost reel for three or more matching symbols on adjacent reels.
Players join the game by choosing stakes from 0.20 to 200 credits per spin, and the RTP is 96.48%, while volatility is moderate. Over the 440 spins, 132 paid something, a hit rate of 30%, although 75 of those paying spins returned less than the stake.
The Christmas ball ornament pays 1.5x, 12.5x and 50x for 3, 4 and 5 of a kind, and five-of-a-kind amounts span from 2.5x to 50x the stake. The ornament is the top-paying symbol, and the low symbols are the card ranks 10, J, Q, K and A. The Christmas present is the wild, which also substitutes for all 10 regular symbols on the reels for payline wins.
What a Wild does to the bauble above it
Players do receive a feature though. It is during the base game. A wheel above the reels turns on every spin.
It's named the Christmas Bauble Wheel. It can pass a bauble to the farthest-right of five dwarves on each spin, and baubles shift one pace left per spin until they exit the display. The bauble is triggered when a Wild lands on the reel straight below it. Extra Wilds created by a Spreading Wild Bauble do not activate other baubles.
The major one is the Free Spins. They are set off when a Wild triggers a Free Spins Bauble, and the bonus game begins with four baubles supplied, plus a fifth after the reels halt. A Surprise Bauble that turns into Free Spins can also start the feature. The wheel has no vacant positions during the sequence. So every spin contributes a bauble, and a Free Spins Bauble triggered during the feature contributes the spins displayed. There is no limit to how many times the feature can be retriggered this way. An assortment of baubles appear in the game, and some have extra powers, like so:
- Spreading Wild Bauble – renders all neighbouring and diagonal symbols wild, up to a 3x3 square.
- Free Spins Bauble – grants 7, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, 30 or 50 Free Spins.
- Coin Win Bauble – an instant win of 2.5x to 125x the wager.
- Surprise Bauble – transforms into one of the other baubles at random.
Don't fret. There won't be a test on this roster of baubles afterwards, and suffice to say that large Coin Wins and Spreading Wilds turn up more frequently in the Free Spins. In the session, Free Spins paid 89.40 in total, 34% of everything won.
Thirteen spins, then 307
It's still all about the Free Spins, despite the Christmas Bauble Wheel. As an illustration, it needed 13 spins during testing to activate it the first time. That first round came from a 30 Free Spins Bauble and paid 33.00, or 33x the stake, lifting the balance to its session peak of 1,022.30. It needed another 307 spins to activate it again, and after a swift and frenzied Free Spins sequence, the idea of having to possibly go through another long dry stretch was more than a bit intimidating. That second round, a 50 Free Spins Bauble on spin 320, paid 52.00, and a third arrived 25 spins later from a 15 Free Spins Bauble worth 4.40.
The carrot side of the deal are the prizes, with wins of up to 600 times the stake on offer.
The Minty Breakdown: The session ended at its lowest point, with the balance down from 1,000.00 to 823.20 after 440.00 wagered, a return of 59.8%.