Mystery Joker Slot – Free Demo

A fruit stand running on five paylines

Play'n GO still ship the standard fruit machine themes that everyone recognises by now. Fire Joker and Inferno Joker are stablemates, so Mystery Joker is one of three Play'n GO Joker machines from the studio.

This is a classic payline type slot, unlike their more intricate releases, and it arrives with a 3-reel, 3-row reel set with 5 paylines and a bet strip running 0.40, 0.50, 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00 credits. I played it at 1.00 a spin, the middle step on that strip, for 500 spins.

The best I can describe what I'm looking at is a sort of old-school fruit stand kind of thing. The cabinet behind the reels sits in purple and blue while the base game runs. Poetic, I know. A message ticker above the reels reports each win in words as it lands. Visually it is plain, with crisp spinning effects when symbols line up to form a win. Of my 500 spins, 161 paid something, and 88 of those returned less than the stake.

The Joker is the only symbol that ignores the lines

Including the scatter, there are 6 symbols all in all offered in this game, and beginning from lowest value these are - cherries, lemons, grapes, bells, stars, and the Joker. The Joker is the only one that pays from anywhere on the grid rather than along a line. Payouts are worked out left to right with only the highest win paying per line, so for example, a complete line of the top paying symbol (Star) delivers 50x the line bet, while scatter wins are multiplied by the total bet and added to the payline wins. One frame from inside a free spins round showed three Jokers with the ticker reading "Won 50.00 on 3 scatters" and a Total Win of 50.00 at my 1.00 stake, which is 50x the total bet.

The game launched on September 9, 2014. My run peaked at 25,425.80 on spin 463, from a 24,999.00 start. The base game can produce respectable wins even on a set this tiny. The balance bottomed out at 24,893.80, and the longest gap without any win at all was 17 spins, ending on spin 227. In fact, I hit a 150x win outside of the bonus, twice, while testing. Spin 257 paid another 134x, and it is not logged as a free spins round either.

The round turns the screen red for ten spins

The scatter symbol is the Joker. Two frames on the purple and blue base-game background show three Jokers landing and lighting up, which is the trigger. Three of them anywhere grant 10 free spins, and it's a fixed count rather than a sliding one, and it's possible to retrigger up to a total of 50 free spins. The round switches the whole background to red, and the ticker holds the line "Free spin 1 of 10", so both the mode and the count sit on screen throughout. During my test run I triggered the round seven times over 500 spins. The gaps between triggers ran from 10 spins to 151. I received 10 free spins on every one of them, with no retrigger inside that run. One captured frame does show a retrigger being handed out, a Mystery Win award of 50.00 carrying the line "You won 10 additional free spins."

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What the seven rounds added up to

Two or more Jokers pay a Mystery Win worth between 1x and 100x the total bet during the free spins. So the award needs only two Jokers, one fewer than the trigger. My seven rounds paid between 15x and 83x the stake, and together they were worth 27% of everything I won. The middle five came in at 19x, 26x, 28x, 29x and 50x. The remaining 73% came out of the base game, against 500.00 wagered and 909.10 won across the session.

Mystery Joker is a five-payline fruit machine with one feature, and most importantly, a free spins game with a mystery payout that decides the round.

Our Minty Verdict: Seven rounds of ten free spins over 500 spins produced 27% of everything this session won; the other 73% came off five paylines of cherries, lemons and bells. The Mystery Win is a single reveal inside a round whose length is fixed before it starts.